Back in 2021, TUMO Labs joined forces with VXSoft to bring a number of hands-on projects to students interested in exploring data analysis and machine learning. Let’s hear from VXSoft’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ruben Manukyan and take a closer look at the projects that have revamped the VXSoft Mulberry 2.0 software!
VXSoft specializes in creating electronic document management systems, with their main product being the Mulberry software. “Organizations in Armenia and abroad use the software to eliminate paperwork and manage the flow of electronic documents within the organization, while reducing their paper consumption,” Ruben says. Over the past four years, Mulberry has been implemented in 300+ companies in five countries, with over 12,000 users.
In 2020, VXSoft was looking for students who were eager to help shape and improve the Mulberry software, which is used by hundreds of employees in governmental bodies and banks nationwide. “We wanted to outsource the research portion of the product development by partnering with universities or other educational institutions. Students could do the research as part of their thesis or midterm project. We ended up partnering with TUMO Labs since project-based learning was exactly what we were looking for, and their guided self-learning students knew the fundamentals of machine learning and data science,” Ruben states. The partnership between TUMO Labs and VXSoft was a match made in heaven! TUMO Labs wanted to team up with local and international tech companies to help students gain practical experience and VXSoft was up for the job!
Document exchange is one of the key features of Mulberry 2.0, and there are over 100 installations connected to each other that exchange important documents on a daily basis. The projects began with a research phase where VXSoft provided their data to students at TUMO Labs so they could take a deep dive into what features users needed the most, which would in turn help them start developing the software.
In the past two years, we kicked off five projects with VXSoft, and our students helped upgrade the software and add cool new features.
In the User Behaviour Analysis project, students were tasked to analyze user behavior in order to make sure the software remains secure. VXSoft collects all important user actions in their system to provide manual filtration and analysis tools for their users. The students were working on detecting suspicious activity in the software through a machine learning model that uses the DBSCAN algorithm and examines workload patterns or idle periods of users.
The Automatic Deadline Suggestion System project was all about developing a deadline estimation system to prevent unattainable deadlines for the tasks in the software by analyzing data provided on deadline expirations/overdues. VXSoft had a couple of years worth of data of all actions that had deadlines and estimations, as well as statistics on deadline overdues.
In the Workflow Definition Optimization project, students looked at incoming unstructured JSON metadata into a “task” that appears in the Mulberry 2.0 software. Every time a document arrives in the system, users of the software must choose a “workflow” (based on data received) to create a task. The main focus of this project was to analyze workflow definitions for task flow optimization and select all unused or unnecessary flows from the workflow.
Thanks to these projects at TUMO Labs, the VXSoft Mulberry 2.0 has a plethora of new features! It’s also worth noting that Sasun Tadevosyan, a TUMO Labs student secured an internship at VXSoft following the 2021 User Behavior Analysis project. Sasun Tadevosyan was chosen to become an intern after his active participation in the projects and later received an offer to join the team as a junior software engineer.
“Everyone in the team helps me, and any difficulty or uncertainty is solved by mutual effort,” he says. You might want to read what led him to VXSoft in this blog post!
“I admire the fact that students at TUMO Labs are in a self-learning environment. Not only do they have a lot of research capabilities, they’ve also chosen to start exploring certain areas entirely on their own. They’re self-starters and that makes the workflow extremely productive,” Ruben reflects.
TUMO Labs has launched three more projects in 2023 to upgrade the VXSoft Mulberry 2.0 software, and we’re looking forward to seeing the innovative solutions they come with this time!
