Entrepreneur & Technologist

Category: artificial intelligence

Future of Autonomous Cars – Part 1: The Product Perspective

Future Self-Driving Cars of the Past– Advertising Archive, via Everett Collection

This is part one of a multi-part series on the future of autonomous driving. Each one of these posts focuses on a different perspective on various challenges and opportunities in the design, development, engineering and legal aspects of building the cars of the future. Here is the first one, which takes a product design perspective. Hope you enjoy reading it.

In areas of science and technology where rapid disruption is prevalent, researchers and engineers are constantly surrounded by several challenges of varying degrees of urgency and complexity. In a continuous cycle, innovative solutions for solving these technological obstacles are found and significant progress is made, which gives birth to new challenges.

As one of the most active areas of research and development still in its infancy, autonomous driving is clearly not an exception. Such rapid pace of progress makes it more difficult to observe key challenges and opportunities in that market. Therefore, what looks like a big challenge in 2018 might be long resolved in the coming years thanks to rapid advances made in autonomous driving and other related fields.

If Picasso Were to Paint The Mona Lisa

Ever wondered how Picasso could have painted The Mona Lisa?

I used the ideas of Neural Style Transfer presented by Andrew Ng in his deep learning course to optimize hidden layer activations of a pretrained Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) to generate one!

The algorithm was fed the image of Mona Lisa painting as well as a second “style image” representing Picasso’s painting style. I then used Tensorflow to optimize the ConvNet in 200 iterations. Here is the input and output.

The following video shows the generated image being progressively built (intermediate results are rendered every 10 iterations.)

Storytelling in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Excerpts from this post appeared on this Huffington Post piece. 

Software was eating the world. Then came AI.

Can you remember the last time you sat in on a panel discussion about technology without hearing the words “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning”? Reminiscent of big data in 2007, the ubiquity of AI in 2017 is profoundly impacting the world. Unlike big data, which predominantly focused on the enterprise sector, rapid advances in AI and machine learning are directly affecting end consumers in a much more tangible fashion. In only a few years, we went from smart phones and smart TVs to AI-powered shoes, strollers, luggage and bags, doors, trucks, burger flipping robots, and even more recently, Microsoft’s audacious attempt to push AI into single board computing devices the size of a red-pepper flake.

State of LA Startups

Starting a high tech startup 5 years ago in Los Angeles would be nothing like how it is in 2013. Los Angeles is finally earning the credit it deserves in being one of the world’s fastest growing startup communities. Events like LA Tech Summit with almost 1000 attendees are testaments to this movement. I feel lucky to have co-founded Tilofy in LA this year where we are surrounded by a vibrant community to help us succeed. Team Tilofy was featured along with thought leaders like Michael Abbott from Kleiner Perkins in a short video about the role of startups in creating a vibrant economy in Los Angeles.

Tech Startups & the LA Economy from USC Viterbi on Vimeo.

Starting a New Chapter

Peek Into The Future

Tilofy – Peek Into The Future

Around 10 years ago I came to the states to pursue my dreams. I spent the first two years as a masters student in George Washington University and the next five getting my PhD at University of Southern California. To me, it wasn’t about buying a nice car, living in a nice house or eating at the most expensive restaurants. In a world that has given us Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs there are many more satisfying dreams to live for and get inspired by. Throughout these years, I had the blessing of working with some of the smartest people I have seen in my life at USC, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Samsung. People who empowered me, inspired me to dream, and supported my professional growth. I am indebted to them all.

Today was my last day as a senior technologist in Samsung Electronics R&D and hopefully my last day ever as an employee. I co-founded Tilofy for a dream. To give users a faster and easier way of discovering time and location-sensitive information on their mobile devices. My new journey has begun and I am already humbled by family, friends and colleagues supporting this effort. I wake up everyday with a dream of becoming the next agent of change through my entrepreneurial journey. To reach a point that enables me to have a positive effect on the lives of millions of people all around the world, through technology, philanthropy or hopefully both.

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