As 2024 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on how the BigML team has been working to enhance our platform, solidifying its place as a leader in the machine learning space. In a world where artificial intelligence is reshaping industries, BigML remains a game-changer with its no nonsense approach to bringing more self-directed users on board the ML/AI boat.
Since our inception in 2011, our mission has been clear: to democratize machine learning by making it easy, accessible, transparent, traceable, interpretable, scalable, and user-friendly for everyone, regardless of technical expertise. What truly sets BigML apart is its ability to empower professionals across all fields to create and use their own ML solutions by teaching them how to fish for themselves. As we celebrate our achievements and innovations, we would like to take this opportunity to review the main highlights and milestones that have shaped our journey since its inception.
A Journey of Innovation: BigML’s Major Milestones
BigML’s evolution is marked by consistent innovation and strategic growth. Here are some of the defining milestones in its journey:
- 2011: Laying the foundation. BigML was established in Corvallis, Oregon, USA, with a clear mission: to simplify machine learning and bring its transformative potential to non-technical users and businesses worldwide.
- 2012: Public launch of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). BigML pioneered MLaaS with the launch of our platform, allowing users to create predictive models through an intuitive dashboard, with no coding required!
- 2013: Building a robust ML platform. BigML maked a large leap in functionality. In 2013, BigML added inline sources and interactive filters, the Sunburst Visualization, and brought 7 new features including Text Analysis, Microsoft Excel Export, Multi-label Classification, the BigML PredictServer, and more.
- 2014: Introduction to Anomaly Detection. Expanding its portfolio of capabilities, BigML introduces a new tool to detect outliers, which has been one of the most used tools to solve real-world use cases.
- 2015: BigML opened the European headquarters in Valencia, Spain, to bring talent to the company and set Valencia on the map to run several ML events that will attract innovation and prosperity, such as the first Machine Learning School, held in Valencia in September of 2015. This very same month BigML launched Association Discovery on the cloud, becoming the first machine learning service offering a tool on the cloud to pinpoint hidden relations between values of your variables in high-dimensional datasets with just one click.
- 2016: Innovation and quality training. In January we launched the Education Program to aid educational institutions, students, and companies requesting training materials to learn about machine learning. The program has become an important pillar of BigML’s success story. Today, more than 800 universities around the world use our services to train their students and hundreds of professionals are now BigML Certified Analysts, Engineers, and Architects thanks to our Certifications Program launched in 2016. This year also brought a key innovative milestone that made workflow automation available! WhizzML, a new domain-specific language for automating machine learning workflows, implementing high-level machine learning algorithms, and easily sharing them with others. WhizzML offers out-of-the-box scalability, abstracts away the complexity of underlying infrastructure, and helps analysts, developers, and scientists reduce the burden of repetitive and time-consuming analytics tasks. 2016 also brought to life Logistic Regression, one of the most popular methods used to solve classification problems, as well as Topic Models, the resource that helps you easily find thematically related terms in your text data.
- 2017: All in for our ML platform. We continue enhancing our toolkit as our goal is to make the BigML platform complete and competitive for our customers. This year BigML launched Boosted Trees to easily solve classification and regression problems, Time Series for analyzing time-based data when historical patterns can explain future behavior, and Deepnets, the optimized version of Deep Neural Networks.
- 2018: AutoML and more innovations. The main focus continues to be expanding our offering. We debuted our AutoML tool: OptiML, an optimization process for model selection and parameterization that automatically finds the best supervised model to help you solve classification and regression problems. Fusions came later, and they combined several supervised models (models, ensembles, logistic regressions, and deepnets) to provide better performance than any of the individual components. Later this year, we brought Data Transformations to the platform allowing users more ways to do feature engineering and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to yield uncorrelated features and reduce dimensionality. 2018 was also the year when BigML became one of the first machine learning platforms to offer a GDPR-compliant solution, emphasizing its commitment to data privacy and ethical AI.
- 2019: Time for Linear Regression, widely applied across industries, simple to understand, and allows high interpretability. Having a more complete set of well-proven algorithms implemented in a standardized fashion, we started focusing on delivering vertical predictive applications for our enterprise customers in select industries.
- 2020: Data connectors extension. In response to the need to import data directly from external databases to streamline machine learning workflows, BigML extended its data connectors and now supports MySQL, SQL Server, and Elasticsearch in addition to PostgreSQL.
- 2021: ML with image data! Bringing Image Processing to the BigML platform, enhanced our offering to solve a wide variety of computer vision and image classification use cases in a single platform: label your image data, train and evaluate your models, make predictions, and automate your end-to-end machine learning workflows. And this is possible for all supervised and unsupervised models!
- 2022: More complete solutions to work with image data! Such a great enhancement from 2021 brought an extension for 2022: Object Detection, a great resource that allows our customers to go a step further with their image data to locate objects and annotate regions in images. Once image regions are defined, BigML lets you train and evaluate Object Detection models, make predictions with them, and automate end-to-end ML workflows. Again: All on a single platform! We also brought a new tool to make machine learning operations easy! BigML Ops lets you automate the entire ML life-cycle so you can build, deploy, and operate the most advanced ML workflows at scale. BigML Ops gives you all the traceability, reproducibility, and scalability required by the most stringent enterprises. Additionally, we also launched BigMLFlow making it easy for you to manage and deploy BigML’s machine learning models.
- 2023: BigML spun out AccuShoot, the new technology that revolutionizes the way people train to use firearms. AccuShoot combines computer vision and machine learning to significantly reduce the resources and the time required to improve and sharpen the marksmanship skills of law-abiding citizens, law enforcement forces, and military service members by automatically tracking and providing feedback on actual shooting performance during live fire drills.
- 2024: Advanced deployment solutions for different customers. Additionally, the development team continues improving our Bindings and Libraries, our command line tool BigMLer, as well as integrations such as BigML-NodeRed or Zapier, or the Add-on for Google Sheets more complete than ever. And last but not least, in 2024 we have reached a remarkable milestone with 200,000 registered users, solidifying our position as a trusted global platform.
What Makes BigML Unique?
While many companies offer machine learning solutions, BigML’s distinctive approach lies in its dedication to simplicity, transparency, and versatility, offering a comprehensive ML platform able to fit the needs of every industry, organization, or business, regarding their size and ML knowledge.
An Machine Learning platform for all!
- Intuitive, no-code: BigML’s greatest feature is its user-friendly dashboard, designed for both technical and non-technical users. By visualizing complex workflows, BigML eliminates the steep learning curve typically associated with machine learning. Tasks like data preprocessing, model training, evaluation, and predictions, are streamlined through an interactive and intuitive dashboard.
- API-first: BigML’s API-first approach makes it easy to integrate machine learning capabilities into existing applications. From real-time predictions to custom pipelines, developers have the flexibility to build ML solutions powered by BigML’s robust backend. Being API-first ensures that all ML-solutions that you can come up with can be built, scaled and parallelized. Additionally, they immediately start providing single and batch predictions at will, which totally removes the deployment barrier.
End-to-end ML workflow
BigML covers the entire machine learning lifecycle:
- Data preparation: Clean and preprocess your data with automation.
- Feature engineering: Generate relevant features to improve model accuracy.
- Model training and evaluation: Train models with options like classification, regression, time series, clustering, anomaly detection, association discovery, and topic modeling, with all types of data: text, categorical, numeric, date-time, items, and image data.
- Predictions and deployment: Deploy models effortlessly in production in real-time, without worrying about the infrastructure. BigML takes care of that for you!
Focus on interpretability
BigML’s user-friendly visualizations allow users to dive deeper into their models and make sense of the underlying logic. And even better, BigML allows users to work collaboratively within their Organizations. All resources available in the Dashboard are also available through our REST API and WhizzML for automation, and of course, everything covered in detailed documentation.
GDPR and enterprise compliance
BigML takes data security very seriously. Its GDPR-compliant solutions and private deployment options ensure businesses meet stringent regulatory standards without compromising functionality.
Automation
Machine learning is an iterative process. BigML makes it easy with OptiML, our AutoML tool that finds the best ML model for your data. Another tool we provide is Scriptify which allows you to recreate complex ML workflows with a single click. Both options are particularly valuable features for businesses looking to experiment with different algorithms without requiring deep expertise in ML.
More than a Machine Learning Platform: Empowering ML and Collaboration
Having explored the evolution of the BigML platform, it’s important to note that BigML is more than a technology provider. Developing cutting-edge tools is central to what we do, but equally important is our commitment to supporting our customers during their ML journey. That is why we offer a wide range of services and organize events designed to empower our users and ensure they have all the guidance and resources they need to succeed.
Quality ML training
Some companies have machine learning experts within their teams but others don’t and wish to create teams of ML experts by upskilling existing personnel. BigML can help with that. We provide a complete array of options to learn machine learning, ranging from BigML Certifications tailored for different profiles (Analysts, Engineers, and Architects), personalized ML courses that we can do online or onsite, and of course our collaborations with hundreds of universities and other educational institutions that choose BigML to train future leaders.
Global ML schools and other events
We started with the first ML School back in 2015, and since then we have run 12 of these international conferences all around the world. We have run 4 editions in Valencia (Spain), 1 in Seville (Spain), 2 online, 2 in Brazil (Sao Paulo and Curitiba), 2 in Breukelen (The Netherlands), and 1 in Doha (Qatar). Explore our past ML Schools and stay tuned for future destinations! In addition to our ML Schools, BigML has also participated or organized many other events around machine learning, check out our events page to discover a busy calendar of events that BigML has been part of since 2014!
Innovative partners
Since we launched our Preferred Partner Program back in 2018 plenty innovative companies around the world have joined forces with BigML to excel in the ML field across industries. To name a few, with Jidoka we brought together ML and robotics, with SlicingDice we brought ML to Data Warehouses, A1 Digital is a key partner in Europe, our partnership with INFORM enabled the next generation data-driven applications, and with Fundación ONCE we have created applications for inclusion. These are just some of the alliances created thanks to our PPP.
Engaging blog content
The BigML Blog serves as our primary channel for sharing updates about the platform enhancements, feature releases, and detailed insights into the world of machine learning. It’s a space where we delve into innovations and provide valuable information for our community. But it’s not all business, we also enjoy adding a touch of fun! For example, in 2018, we celebrated the Oscars by predicting the winners, achieving a perfect score with 6 out of 6 correct predictions! It’s just one of the many ways we engage with the ML community beyond the conventional.
Real-world ML solutions
For all the reasons described above, many customers trust BigML and choose our platform to develop their real-world ML solutions and continue improving. We are honored to say that from small startups to global enterprises, BigML’s platform has been deployed across industries to tackle diverse challenges:
- Retail: BigML helps retailers optimize inventory management and forecast demand.
- Finance: Banks use BigML for fraud detection and credit scoring.
- Manufacturing: Companies rely on BigML for predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization.
- Healthcare: BigML supports predictive diagnostics and patient segmentation. On this topic, stay tuned for future announcements on BigML for Healthcare to learn about several ML solutions we have developed to enhance people’s quality of life. It’s coming soon!
The Future of Machine Learning with BigML
With an intuitive and robust platform, powerful tools, and a track record of innovation, BigML stands out in the crowded landscape of ML tools and we plan to continue this journey to help organizations around the world become “AI-first” enterprises. By staying committed to accessibility, transparency, interpretability, traceability, and scalability, we aim to empower even more businesses to harness the power of machine learning knowing full well it’s a journey of evolution. As always, feel free to reach out to us at info@bigml.com to start the conversation.
From all of us at BigML, we wish you success and growth in 2025 and beyond!