PolicyInsiderAI
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Powerful CPU and GPU instances to run demanding AI algorithms

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A 100% European Public Cloud for guaranteed GDPR compliance

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Full scalability within minutes to meet peaks in user demand in real-time

Executive summary

Policy-Insider.AI is an emerging European start-up that leverages the power of AI to provide a digital public affairs platform. Traditionally, the public affairs business required professionals to manually sort through, scan and process public policy documents. With thousands of documents being published every day across dozens of different websites and databases, even expert-level professionals need to dedicate a lot of their time to get the full picture on relevant policies. Not to mention, all of them operate with a different logic and are published in their local language, making international public affairs operations even more difficult to conduct.
 

Policy-Insider.AI aims to change the public affairs environment through combining traditional expert knowledge with the latest AI algorithms to provide professionals a central public policy monitoring and knowledge platform. As a one-stop shop, the start-up’s platform provides centralized access to dozens of public policy institutions and policy makers across borders and language barriers in real-time. Thanks to Policy-Insider.AI’s digital platform, public affairs professionals are equipped better than ever with all the information they need to enable their clients to make well-informed decisions.

 

The challenge

To make its powerful AI-driven platform work, Policy-Insider.AI needs to process large amounts of data using highly complex processing pipelines. As the start-up is continuously adding new documents and sources for a growing user base, cost and time efficient workload processing is a crucial business factor. About 5,000 new political documents are processed per day, consisting of more than 300 different types of documents from over 40 different institutions, including national institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France as well as several bodies of the European Union. More European and non-European national governments and United Nations institutions are added on a regular base. Additionally, 8,000 social media posts from more than 4,000 different policy makers from 60 political parties are processed daily to provide up-to-date insights.

Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Policy-Insider.AI highly values data privacy. Being a European company, the team always needs to be sure to comply with national and European data processing and data privacy regulations such as the EU-GDPR. Using servers within the European Union to host the platform is not only a plus, but a must-have to win clients’ trust in a sensitive yet competitive environment.

As powerful AI algorithms are at the platform’s core, the team needs to be able to efficiently train its AI models with a good inference performance. The servers running the platform therefore need to leverage the latest in GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology on the hardware side.

Occasionally, Policy-Insider.AI also needs the ability to scale up its platform when important political proceedings are happening that result in a surge of new public policy documents. Increased processing power, bandwidth and user capacity need to be provided in real-time to answer peaks in user demand, which averages at 100,000 queries per day.

The solution

To fulfil all these requirements, Policy-Insider.AI chose the OVHcloud Public Cloud to host its platform. The infrastructure of OVHcloud’s Public Cloud offerings can be set up in a simple way to support clients with on-demand resources to flexibly scale their project.

To offer a powerful platform that processes vast amounts of input on a daily basis whilst delivering a smooth and highly available service for users all over the globe, Policy-Insider.AI takes advantage of OVHcloud’s CPU and GPU instances from the C2 and T1 families, respectively, to run its processing pipelines and AI algorithms. The cloud provider’s CPU servers are equipped with guaranteed resources and are especially designed to run applications such as AI that have a high demand for computing power. The GPU instances, meanwhile, integrate NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphic processors to offer broad parallel processing capabilities designed to accelerate AI and high-performance computing (HPC) in the datacentre.

Policy-Insider AI

 

At the heart of its solution, Policy-Insider.AI’s architecture runs a search engine cluster enabling users to quickly find the information they need. Running on Public Cloud instances, this cluster benefits from being built on a flexible infrastructure that provides additional resources on demand, when they are needed to meet increased user demand in real-time.

“The availability of powerful CPU and latest GPU architectures such as the NVIDIA Tesla V100 on flexible instances is crucial to our platform effectively handling AI workloads when training and running advanced algorithms. Embedded in a flexible yet secure Public Cloud, we can leverage the power of AI at a great price-performance ratio.”
Agata Chudzinska, Co-founder & Head of AI, Policy-Insider.AI

The Policy-Insider.AI platform runs primarily in one of OVHcloud’s datacentres in France, ensuring compliance with all European data and privacy regulations as well as high European security standards. OVHcloud’s high-quality servers fabricated in its own factories run all Policy-Insider.AI environments in the cloud. Moreover, OVHcloud takes care of research & development for all hardware components and functionalities using state-of-the-art resources at competitive pricing.

Working with many static files such as PDF documents, text files and pictures, Policy-Insider.AI uses OVHcloud’s cloud storage solutions that combine great performance with high security, scalability and resilience. OVHcloud’s Object Storage allows the use of static files from the platform in a cost-effective way. The storage’s scalability allows for long-term flexibility as Policy-Insider.AI keeps growing both its business and the number of public policy document sources. OVHcloud Object Storage provides unlimited space to store all types of files.

For increased resilience, the data stored is distributed within clusters that have triple replication on both different disks and servers. This is especially handy when it comes to creating backups of the platform, for which the start-up uses Object Storage as well.

The result

Thanks to OVHcloud, Policy-Insider.AI’s platform runs smoothly and reliably offers its users high availability and performance. Leveraging the latest cloud infrastructure technologies and components, the start-up can deliver its clients comprehensive and meaningful insights across thousands of documents and data sets. This includes high-quality GPU technology, which plays a key role in reliably running the company’s sophisticated AI algorithms in the cloud. At the same time, Policy-Insider.AI’s and OVHcloud’s shared European values, which include a high regard for data security and data privacy, allow for a fully GDPR-compliant service at all times.

With its database and user base growing steadily, OVHcloud’s Public Cloud allows the start-up to concentrate on its core business as the infrastructure can flexibly be scaled to changing needs as well as to accommodate short-time usage peaks. This brings Policy-Insider.AI in the perfect position to change the way public affairs professionals source information and accelerate decision making processes.

 

“The OVHcloud team has a very collaborative attitude and supports us to overcome any obstacles as well as to open up new possibilities to grow our business. The OVHcloud infrastructure and service allows us continuously innovate and expand our database.”

Agata Chudzinska, Co-founder & Head of AI, Policy-Insider.AI