Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jeff Feng, CEO of CloudPick (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Where is the technology from? What is your background?

Jeff Feng: It has been introduced and built for a thousand years. The 3D computer vision is not a new domain. I do have a research background in Computer Vision. It’s one of the domains in artificial intelligence. Initially, it was not categorized as artificial intelligence. Computer vision plus machine learning equals artificial intelligence. Somehow it’s true.

Sramana Mitra: That is true. I have a computer science graduate degree from MIT. The computer vision lab was not far from my office. Tell me about your research background.

Jeff Feng: I have a PhD from the University of California. I also did some research on 2D-based analysis and later moved to the 3D world. 

Sramana Mitra: There are other applications. You could monitor shop floors with this and other ways to apply this technology. Why did you choose to apply it to specifically this?

Jeff Feng: Our solution would be applicable to different industries. It can be across fields, but we chose the retail vertical. It’s something interesting to the entire team. Retail is impacting people’s daily lives. People go to stores and do some shopping. That’s the reason we picked this field. If you invested in different industries, offline retail really needs help to rebuild the process.

What they have are ERP systems that they use to manage their resources, but they don’t have the intelligence part beyond that. The current system they use is for daily operations. They don’t really play a role in making the operation more efficient. It’s quite interesting.

Sramana Mitra: It is. From your vantage point, what are the open problems? You can think about it two ways. One is you have a window into the offline retail world. Are there other AI applications areas? Question number two is with the kinds of things you are doing, what other problems do you see being solved with this kind of technology?

Jeff Feng: An example is manufacturing or the invention of new medicine, which have repetitive work from human beings. It’s time-consuming. If you can use the computation power from the machines, you can save a great amount of time. 

Sramana Mitra: Can you give some examples or workflow processes?

Jeff Feng: One thing I can think of is in the senior living industry. For a senior person who’s looking for a suitable place to live, they need to check out everything. If you’re able to provide a domain-specific search engine with all the parameters set up for different searchers, that would be great. After a few decades, there will be people who are used to the internet world who don’t have the tools to find the best place.

Sramana Mitra: I saw a wonderful presentation from a professor at MIT a few years ago on some of the concepts that you talked about – application of computer vision into the geriatric management problem. It hasn’t been commercialized yet but it has potential. 

Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jeff Feng, CEO of CloudPick
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