Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jeff Feng, CEO of CloudPick (Part 1)

In this discussion, we explore use cases of Vision Sensors within AI.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as CloudPick.

Jeff Feng: I’m the Founder and CEO of the company. We are focusing on technologies in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data as well as Internet of Things. We have done a bunch of work in technology development and utilization in real-life industries.

We are focusing on using those technologies in the offline retail business. It’s a huge market. We’re trying to empower or rebuild the offline retail. It’s the same fundamental business logic but using technology to accelerate the data operation or reduce costs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into use cases within offline retail where you’re seeing high-impact interventions.

Jeff Feng: The real motivation is trying to optimize customers’ shopping experience. That was the original motivation. Whether it’s the consumer or operator, there is still space to improve their happiness in store. We’re trying to create a different shopping experience. We started from the consumer side’s checkout. We think we can replace the repetitive work of cashiers to check out customers.

The technology behind it is that if you are able to track the movement of customers from when they enter to when they leave, you can then tell which region they went to and which product they interacted with. If you’re able to combine that information, you will be able to know the products the customer picked out. If you’re able to get their payment information, you’d be able to check on them. There will be no intervention from store operators. There will be no interaction from people using a self checkout machine.

We want to create a frictionless shopping experience. By doing that, you install sensors in the store, especially what we call 3D vision sensors. Basically, you recreate the entire customer journey in the store. Based on those data, you can optimize your operation. For traditional retailers, they only have the resulting data. If they want to optimize their numbers, they don’t have concrete actions because they don’t how what’s going on in the store.

We create an e-commerce-like platform for offline stores all the way from customer shopping data, product performance data, to the store layout. Everything is digitized. It’s quite like an e-commerce platform. You have all the data to monitor. You have a BI system to utilize and diagnose your operations data. You’ll be able to tell if operators are working efficiently. You have all types of information.

Sramana Mitra: It’s basically a store management technology. Is the monitoring camera-driven?

Jeff Feng: It’s not exactly like cameras but we do have cameras. It’s more like a self-driving vehicle type of technology. The fundamental technology is like LIDR or infrared light. You’ll be able to measure the distance from the sensors to the floor. 

Sramana Mitra: It’s sensor-driven.

Jeff Feng: Yes, we call it vision sensor. It combines information from a traditional RGB camera with sensors. By using a 3D vision sensor, you can recreate or reconstruct the entire physical store into a digital version. Imagine you have a computer. You have a store. In real-time, you can recreate the store in your computer. We recreate 30 frames of those per second. It’s real-time. You analyze the entire store using the 3D model.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jeff Feng, CEO of CloudPick
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