In 1995, Serge Belongie earned a B.S. (with honor) in EE from Caltech, adopted by a Ph.D. in EECS from Berkeley in 2000. From 2001-2013, he served as a professor within the Division of Pc Science and Engineering on the College of California, San Diego.
Serge co-founded Digital Persona, the world’s first mass-market fingerprint identification system, Anchovi Labs, a platform to arrange, browse and share private images (acquired by Dropbox), and Orpix, a picture recognition framework that helps numerous software domains.
The MIT Know-how Evaluate named Belongie to their record of Innovators below 35 in 2004. In 2007, Serge and his co-authors obtained a Marr Prize Honorable point out for a paper offered on the Worldwide Convention on Pc Imaginative and prescient. In 2015, he was the recipient of the ICCV Helmholtz Prize, awarded to authors of papers which have made basic contributions to the sector of laptop imaginative and prescient. He has additionally been honored with the NSF CAREER Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Analysis Fellowship.
LDV Capital’s Founder and Basic Accomplice Evan Nisselson crossed paths with Serge in March 2013. Since then, he has been impressed by his insights, experience, and fervour for serving to individuals succeed. They’ve been working carefully collectively on our LDV Imaginative and prescient Summit since 2014. Serge turned our very first Professional in Residence again in 2016.
As we strategy the tenth Annual LDV Imaginative and prescient Summit, we thought it becoming to pose a couple of burning inquiries to Serge. We delved into his experiences as a distinguished determine in AI and sought his insights on the current panorama of visible applied sciences. Moreover, we explored his ideas on the prospects out there to researchers aiming to convey their work to market and impression humanity at giant.
Kat: What’s the driving drive behind your ardour for laptop imaginative and prescient and AI analysis?
Serge: For so long as I can keep in mind, I’ve been interested by patterns and categorizing issues. In junior excessive, I did a category challenge on taxonomizing screws, bolts, and different fasteners. By the point I began school, I used to be interested by patterns in audio, e.g., bioacoustics, such because the vocalizations of birds or whales. When it got here to pictures, I used to be drawn to fingerprints and human faces. I labored on lip studying from video and I discovered every thing about that downside fascinating: the fusion of the audio and the visible, the variation between audio system, and the computational challenges. On the time (the early 90s), digital cameras had been rising onto the scene, however they lacked any form of computational understanding. At the moment you’re taking it without any consideration that you will see little detection bins across the faces within the viewfinder, or that you will have sensible picture album group software program that is aware of your complete household. However again then, none of that existed.
I had the sense there could be an enormous demand for this type of know-how, and I additionally liked the maths behind it. I wasn’t interested by majoring in math or physics, however I liked the methods that these fields used. You would apply them to sound, video, and pictures, and use superior utilized math strategies in that context to unravel deeply fascinating issues. Past that, I can not actually justify the selection as a result of I really feel like, one way or the other, I used to be placed on this Earth to do that.
