11. November 2022

Software for efficient data protection

The revised Swiss Data Protection Act (DSG) will become effective on September 1, 2023. By this date, companies must have implemented technical and organizational measures to protect personal data following the new legal requirements. Violations could result in severe penalties.

In addition, there is an increasing risk of cyber attacks in which unprotected or inaccurately stored customer and employee data are exploited. That leads to reputational damage and, in the worst case, to the loss of annoyed customers.

Together with our partner krm, we wrote the following article about why software solutions are essential for effectively and efficiently implementing data protection measures. This article was published in issue 11/2022 of Swiss IT Magazine.

Swiss IT Magazine 11/22

Identifying personal data in heterogeneous IT environments

One such application for automating manual processes is our award-winning PID Cockpit. The „PID Cockpit“ is a joint development between Karakun and the Swiss Information Governance Competence Centre (krm.swiss).

This AI-based software solution lets users efficiently identify personal data in heterogeneous IT environments. For this purpose, the PID Cockpit can search all data sources whose files can be accessed (directly or via API). It is irrelevant whether the data is structured or unstructured. The system recognizes industry- and company-specific text types when set up correctly. It can be run on local servers or in the cloud, as required.

The benefits for users are simplicity and the associated time and cost savings. Automated, transparent AI processes also minimize errors and make search results reproducible and consistent.

Would you like to learn more about the PID Cockpit? We would be happy to advise you. You can get a first overview in our product flyer.

E-Mail
call us
Download flyer
4. November 2022

Take One, Action!

Its 6pm on a Wednesday night in November. The office is dark and empty. Everybody went home to their loved ones. Everybody? Wait, there is still light in the meeting room. Bowls of chips, chilled bottles of beer, laptops, colored pens and 6 heads in a discussion? What is going on in the Karakun Office?

Agenda of DesignGarten Basel
Agenda of DesignGarten Basel
Discussions at DesignGarten Basel
Discussions at DesignGarten Basel
Discussions at DesignGarten Basel
Discussions at DesignGarten Basel
Discussions at DesignGarten Basel
Discussions at DesignGarten Basel
Pizza and beer at the first DesignGarten Basel
Pizza and beer at the first DesignGarten Basel

You just witnessed the start of the very first DesignGarten taking place. The DesignGarten is a new meeting format similar to the Developers Hackergarten. A group of passionate people meet to discuss design topics, work on projects, test out new ideas- all related to the area of User Experience Design. We started by collecting the topics everybody brought and then started discussing about User Experience Design and collaboration. How to collaborate within the company, with developers, with the customer? Everybody shared their insights and thoughts, and we ended up having a very vivid discussion which continued way into our tasty pizza dinner. After dinner we tackled a more practical issue by looking into the details of a design project: An “Open Space Allocator”- a concept for an app which will help planning and scheduling sessions for open space conferences and events. We talked about potential users, functionalities, risks, and implementation ideas.

Take Two. Aaand – Action!

All the participants enjoyed the first DesignGarten and are looking forward to the next one, which will take place in the beginning of 2023. Simply join the DesignGarten meetup group at https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/designgarten-basel/ and get notified. Or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. We look forward to meeting you next time!

DesignGarten Meetup Group
18. October 2022

AI-SDV 2022

AI-SDV is the place to be for everyone involved in advanced search and data applications, text mining and visualization technologies. AI-SDV 2022 took place on Oct 10-11, 2022, in Vienna (Austria).

Karakun expert Dr. Holger Keibel presented a talk about information extraction from tabular documents.

Abstract & Slides

In our customer projects involving automated document processing, we often encounter document types providing crucial data in the form of tables. While established text analytics algorithms are usually optimized to operate on running text, they tend to produce rather poor results on tables as they do not capture the non-sequential relations inside them (e.g. interpret the content of a table cell relative to its column title, interpret line breaks inside a cell differently from line breaks between cells or rows).

While there are elaborate information extraction products in the market for a few highly specific types of tabular documents, there is no general approach out there. The main cause for this is the fact that table structures can be encoded by a heterogenous range of layout means (e.g. column boundaries can be signaled by lines vs. aligned text vs. white space).

In this talk, we will illustrate several solutions that we have developed for a range of challenges occurring in this context, both for scanned and digitally generated documents.

Want to learn more about how language analytics and information extraction can boost you business?

Get in touch with us
3. October 2022

PID Cockpit wins 2nd place

After being nominated for the sol.IT-Award, we were happy to have another highlight a couple of days later:

At the official award ceremony at the Bits + Currywurst, we won second place with our PID Cockpit.

Konfettiregen bei der Preisverleihung des sol.IT-Awards 2022.

Claudine Zillmann and Markus Schlichting were on site for us at the Signal-Iduna-Park in Dortmund and were finally able to receive one of the coveted certificates.

Urkunde zweiter Platz beim sol.IT-Award 2022

We congratulate Frederik Dürr and the team of MyShoeFitter GmbH on the first place and are already looking forward to the next edition of this exciting competition..

PID Cockpit simplifies data protection tasks

According to national and international data protection laws, every person has the right to know what data is stored about him or her, in order to have it deleted or corrected. Since this information is nowadays stored in a wide variety of data pools, requests for information and deletion can make identifying personal data a real challenge. Data protection officers, governance & compliance specialists, and HR departments in SMEs and large enterprises need a simple yet effective solution.

In contrast to traditional approaches, the k2 PID Cockpit allows direct access to the data sets in question and the connection of a wide variety of data sources. It offers transparency in the identification of a wide variety of structured as well as unstructured data sources containing personal data.

download flyer
request information
22. September 2022

Karakun nominated for sol.IT-Award

Since 2013, the IT Club Dortmund has been awarding solutions with the sol.IT-Award. The sol.IT-Award honors products that excel through outstanding customer benefits.

Our submission with the k2 PID Cockpit has made it to the final round. Which of the companies finally wins the award will be revealed at the official ceremony at the closing event of #Diwodo22 during the Bits + Currywurst.

About k2 PID Cockpit

According to national and international data protection laws, every person has the right to know what data is stored about him or her, in order to have it deleted or corrected. Since this information is nowadays stored in a wide variety of data pools, requests for information and deletion can make identifying personal data a real challenge. Data protection officers, governance & compliance specialists, and HR departments in SMEs and large enterprises need a simple yet effective solution.

In contrast to traditional approaches, the k2 PID Cockpit allows direct access to the data sets in question and the connection of a wide variety of data sources. It offers transparency in the identification of a wide variety of structured as well as unstructured data sources containing personal data.

Download Flyer (German)
2. September 2022

Digitale Woche Dortmund 2022

The #diwodo is all about one thing: digitalisation. From Sep 26-30, 2022, the focus will be on searching and finding, learning and getting to know, trying and understanding. What brings everyone together is the interest in digital offerings and solutions.

The entire spectrum of the world of digitalisation and innovation will be presented in over 200 events in numerous Dortmund locations. Everyone can take what he or she is interested in. Uncomplicated, open and free of charge.

Our experts have prepared the following presentations for the #diwodo:

Singularity aus Versehen - Warum meine KI die Menschheit auslöscht
Sicherheit in Open Source
Runtime Metriken 101
Die Nadel im Datenschutz-Heuhaufen finden - wie können Information Retrieval und KI helfen?
Arbeite agil, hamse gesacht...
Ich bin C-3PO, wie kann ich Dir helfen?
Docs Docs Docs
Was dein Browser über Dich verrät

We are offering all talks online, some of them even hybrid. For more details, please click on the respective tile or visit https://diwodo.de/veranstaltungsprogramm and enter “Karakun” as search term.

Secure your spot

Hungry for more?

Bits+Currywurst in the unique atmosphere of Germany’s largest football stadium in Dortmund offers impulses from top-class keynote speakers and industry experts on all aspects of digitalisation and is the ideal platform for networking and exchanging information on the latest trends and technologies.

On 29 September 2022, from 2:25 p.m., you will have another chance to satisfy your hunger for knowledge with the talk “Arbeite agil, hamse gesacht…” by and with our experts Claudine Zillmann and Stephan Classen in a typical conference atmosphere.

Logo Bits and Currywurst
29. August 2022

IAA TRANSPORTATION 2022

From 20-25 September 2022, we will be presenting our products EXOKNOX and Lyzium out of our business unit Digital Engineering Solutions to the expert audience at our booth C2017 in hall 13.

Accelerated development processes, shorter time-to-market

In the development of complex mechatronic products, such as commercial vehicles, large amounts of data are continuously generated and used in all phases of the engineering process. Our software solutions provide crucial building blocks for fully digitalised product development with a focus on data quality, data context and efficient data management and processing.

Overview Digital Engineering Solutions

As a development foundation, EXOKNOXhub is the central place for specifying, organising, managing and analysing all the data that influences the behaviour of systems and components and defines the DNA of your product. On the results data side, EXOKNOX Lyzium is the home for all test, simulation and ECU data generated during the development process.

In summary, EXOKNOX software is the key to accelerating core development processes by more than 75% and thus shortening time-to-market.

Simplify your product development

We would be happy to show you live in Hanover how you can benefit from using EXOKNOX and Lyzium. Simply send us an e-mail and arrange your personal appointment.

secure your spot
7. July 2022

PID Cockpit launched

Together with the consulting company Kompetenzzentrum Records Management (krm), we launched the PID Cockpit for identifying and cleansing personal data in heterogeneous IT landscapes. The solution based on the text analysis platform HIBU uses automated AI-based processes for identifying and extracting personal data.

On September 1, 2023, the new Swiss data privacy law will take effect. Individuals will then have the right to know what personal identifiable data (PID) companies store about it. Upon request, companies have to delete or correct this data. Thus, data protection officers, governance & compliance specialists, and HR departments in SMEs and large companies should be well prepared.

Today’s heterogeneous data storage with different data pools can make requests for information, deletion, and the identification and accessibility of personal data, a real challenge. That’s where the PID Cockpit helps:

Unlike traditional approaches, it allows direct access to affected data pools and the integration of various data sources. It offers transparency in identifying a wide range of structured and unstructured data sources that contain personal data.

By automatically locating documents and records containing sensitive personal data, companies benefit from massive time and cost savings and comply with requests for information and deletion. (Elisabeth Maier, CEO Karakun)

The PID Cockpit builds on our text analysis platform HIBU, can easily be adapted to individual customer needs and can be integrated into a wide variety of IT infrastructures. The solution searches for personal data in standard and proprietary “home-grown” solutions as long as there is an application programming interface (API) to access the data sources. The system can recognize both company and industry-specific text types and language patterns. It can be hosted on-premises and in the cloud. Finally, the PID Cockpit can also build a basis for assessing whether data storage complies with legal requirements.

The benefits of the PID Cockpit are its consistency and reproducibility.
Automated AI-based processes replace monotonous and error-prone manual work. And the identification and extraction of information are objectified. The results of the PID Cockpit are insofar resilient, reproducible and consistent. (Bruno Wildhaber, CEO of krm)

We are happy to discuss your individual requirements. Give us a call at +41 61 551 36 00 or send us an email to hibu@karakun.com. Or download our product brochure for a first impression.

email us
Call us
Download Brochure
31. May 2022

prostep ivip Symposium 2022

“Innovations for Systems Creation” is the motto of this year’s prostep ivip Symposium. The event will take place on June 8 and 9, 2022 at the ICS Stuttgart. Central topics are Digital Transformation, Autonomous Driving, Internet of Things, Systems Engineering, Industry 4.0, Digital Twin and many more!

At its anniversary edition – the prostep ivip Symposium celebrates its 25th anniversary – participants from science and industry, opinion leaders and trendsetters, pioneers and innovaters will meet on site and online.

At our booth, we will present our products in the area of Digital Engineering Solutions: our measurement and simulation data management platform Lyzium and EXOKNOX, our solution for functional data management (FDM).

Get in Touch
Digital Engineering Solutions
20. May 2022

Karakun @ SwissText 2022

From June 8 to 10, 2022, text analysis experts from industry and academia meet at SwissText 2022 at SUSPI in Lugano. In addition to our commitment as a Gold-Sponsor, we will be presenting ourselves at the exhibition. We also actively contribute to the top-class conference program with the following talk:

Integrating ML-based Classifiers into an Enterprise Search System

HIBU is a proprietary software platform that we use to build customer solutions around enterprise search and multilingual text analysis. Its architecture provides two analysis pipelines: a first one embeds basic NLP steps, based on the detected document language and used to pre-elaborate the document’s content; a second one contains a sequence of high-level annotators, able to discover information in the document. Some examples are extracting entities from the text, such as persons, places and organizations, identifying paragraphs containing confidential information etc.

Both pipelines use the framework Apache UIMA to combine the annotators that are relevant for the target application. Each single one can be adapted and switched on and off by configuration. Moreover, the framework allows us to add new annotators based on the individual customer’s needs.

In this context, we recently integrated some new ML-based annotators as part of an Innosuisse project carried out in collaboration with SUPSI and DSwiss (“EXTRA”, presented separately, leveraging a fine-tuned version of the pre-trained BERT model and other ML technologies). These annotators allow us to provide scalable document classification, as well as customized information extraction, to be used by applications for further workflow-based functionalities.

In this demo we will show how we wrap the new functionalities into the base platform, and how these are integrated to further enrich the final results.

At our booth in the exhibition area, interested visitors can inform themselves about our HIBU platform. HIBU is a flexible software platform for the cost-effective development of customer solutions, especially in the areas of enterprise search, business intelligence and workflow automation.

Visit HIBU website
Get in Touch with us
2. May 2022

More than sustainable software

The engineering of sustainable software solutions is part of our DNA. However, by “sustainable”, we do not only mean software solutions used over a long time. We also think of projects that have a long-lasting effect on our environment.

These include our UX and development services at Carbonfuture, marketplace and platform for high-quality and impactful carbon sink credits. Or the development of the web application Nutrigap with our partner FiBL, which allows easy calculation of the nutrient budget of a region.

As a company, we are very aware of our social responsibility. Therefore, we do not own a fleet of cars and use public transport for our business trips whenever possible. However, true carbon neutrality is not feasible in our daily business. Is it?

We regularly buy Carbonfuture certificates. Carbonfuture finances carbon sinks worldwide that remove CO2 from the earth’s atmosphere and bind it in the soil. In contrast to other approaches that “only” prevent the formation of CO2, this way stores carbon from the past sustainably for centuries. Only this path leads to true climate neutrality. When do you start?

Carbonfuture CO2 removal certificate
19. April 2022

Successful fourth business year

For the fourth year of our existence, we can again report stable turnover thanks to a strong service business and very high capacity utilisation of more than 60 employees at four locations. In addition to acquiring the Stuttgart-based software company EXOKNOX GmbH, we made massive investments in expanding the existing product range. With this, we are driving our future sustainability.

The basis of the successful year was a large number of projects in different sectors, whereas the public sector deserves special mention. As a framework contract partner of the Canton of Aargau, Karakun is actively working on the visual and structural design as well as the technical implementation of front-end and back-end components for web applications. In addition, several “green” projects, for example with the German Carbonfuture GmbH or FiBL, one of the world’s leading research, advisory and documentation centres for organic agriculture, have been successfully implemented.

Increased visibility in the AI and automotive environment

Especially in artificial intelligence and automotive, Karakun experts left a footprint in the past year. In the AI environment, Karakun is researching the industrial application of the latest deep learning technologies (pre-trained language models) jointly with our partners DSwiss and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) in a project funded by Innosuisse. The knowledge gained is incorporated into the HIBU platform developed in-house. This significantly reduces the effort and cost of using such methods in customer projects and in many cases makes them affordable in the first place, especially for SMEs. In addition to active participation in conferences such as AI-SDV or Swisstext, the customer portfolio was expanded to include legal tech companies.

In the international automotive environment, Karakun presented its “Digital Engineering Solutions” products LYZIUM and EXOKNOX at industry-leading trade fairs such as the IAA MOBILITY in Munich last year. In addition to numerous functional enhancements of EXOKNOX, the first productive version of the Big Data measurement data platform LYZIUM has recently become available. Customers benefit from massive savings in the area of data analysis and parameterisation.

OpenWebStart is under VOLTAge

The product team of VOLTA, the industry solution for the Swiss electrical installation industry, has put a lot of energy into connecting third-party products such as OneDrive. The concept gives users the opportunity to use special solutions already in use together with VOLTA without interrupting their daily work.

Last but not least, the open-source project OpenWebStart, initiated by Karakun, has broken the mark of 250,000 downloads. With OpenWebStart, companies and organisations such as the German Weather Service (DWD), DXC Technology or the Charité Berlin can continue to use existing Java applications as usual despite the discontinuation of WebStart technology by Oracle.

“Our fourth year was a challenging, exhausting year,” says Karakun CEO Elisabeth Maier. “But we are sure that this effort will pay off. Positive feedback from our customers and partners confirms this impression. Special thanks go to our employees. Without their commitment, Karakun would not be where we are today!”