SmartMeUp, high speed visual recognition

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Smart Me Up is a young startup company located in the technopolis of Grenoble. They are specialized in scientific research applied to Artificial Intelligence and devoted to building next-generation tools and they have received the French Young Innovative Company designation.

Their technology makes possible better predictions up to 30 times per second on a basic processor. This means that it’s easy to do real time video processing and use the information contained in each frame.

I interviewed the founder, Loic Lecerf, for my blog StartMeUp (yes, it’s almost the same name) on La Stampa
After a PhD in Artificial Intelligence – Lecerf tells me – I worked for 4 years as research scientist in Xerox Research Centre Europe. I’ve already launch and sold a start-up. This allowed me to invest on this exciting new project, more related to my scientific research background and interest.

For the project, we’ve built tools fast enough to process all the information in any given video up to 30 fps.

This is important because it means that you can use this technology on devices using a camera without introducing lags. For example, we developped an application that can estimate both the mood and the direction of the gaze of a person. Instead of using a self-timer, you could use our technology so that the camera will take a picture automatically when everyone is ready and smiling! We can also prevent a driver to fall asleep, do video-tagging and so on.. what’s limitating here is more the imagination than the technology.

Have a look at the website http://www.smartmeup.org/ for a more exhaustive view.

Until now, we were focusing on the development of our technology. The R&D phase has been done with personal fundings and now that it’s over, we’re entering into business so you may see our technology coming any time soon.

I’m aware that visual recognition – like many other technologies – can be misused, but the other way around is also true. So would this be a reason strong enough to stop the researches altogether? I don’t think so. We should rather discuss publicly about it to state what can and cannot be ethically done. We are concerned as we are playing an important role in this, so we do not try to minimize our responsibility.

The complete article – in Italian, is on La Stampa’s website

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