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Entrepreneur

4 Indians in Santa Clara Are Predicting Your Gaze; Help Apps Leverage Front Facing Cam

Shyamal Dave270 Stories
4 Indians in Santa Clara Are Predicting Your Gaze; Help Apps Leverage Front Facing Cam

Monday October 08, 2012 , 3 min Read

Techies coding away in a garage is the quintessential startup story one associates with. Four Indians, tucked away in a garage in Santa Clara have developed a technology to leverage the power of the front camera in cell phones. Their software turns the nearly un-used front facing camera of the now ubiquitous smartphones into smart eye-tracking devices.

The following video illustrates their technology:

“Looking in general we are in the business of vision control for application and devices. Our primary focus has been on coming up scalable, parallelized and hierarchy of algorithms that can perform real-time and robust computation in the area of computer vision and machine learning. Some of the technologies that we have touched are Emotion detection, Gaze Tracking, Gender Detection, Face Recognition, Gesture recognition and vision enabled Gaming etc. These technologies can used to control devices like Tablet/TV/Mobile Phones in a very natural way,” says Saurav Kumar, CEO, PredictGaze.

They started officially on January 16th 2012. Although the company is just 9 months old, the research work that went behind its creation dates back much longer. “We started as 3 Cornell graduates working on an idea and then our 4th founder joined shortly. We have been self funded till now, mostly from friends and family,” says Aakash Jain, CTO, PredictGaze.

Saurav, Aakash and Abhilekh Agarwal are alumni of Cornell University. All three have worked at multinationals in the past. Saurav is MS Computer Science, Cornell University, Intel Youth Enterprise 2012 Winner, wrote and built machine learning & vision software for UAV, Submarine, Ex- CMU Robotics Research Scholar, INRIA, MOAT and Yahoo. Aakash is an MS Electrical & Computer Eng from Cornell University. He was involved in NSF Game and Xcode Development at Cornell, and is an ex-Cisco and ex-Oracle guy. Abhilekh Agarwal, the CFO, holds an MS Computer Science from Cornell University. He has worked around Scalable computing, Finance, ACM team member at Cornell, and is an Ex-Adobe and Arista Networks. Ketan Banjara, VP, Business Development, MBA, Santa Clara University; BS Computer Science University of Minnesota, Ex-Product Manager at Yahoo! Co-founder & Business Development, Jivalti (autonomous computing) , Director Business Development, Iconix,

The architecture that they have developed at PredictGaze is scalable, parallelized and runs hierarchy of algorithms performing real-time and robust computation in the area of computer vision and machine learning. The scalability factor allows them to work across devices like mobile phone/tablet/PC/SmartTV. “While writing our architecture, we have been very careful about how users interact with mobile devices. Our architecture and algorithms are pretty robust to change in lighting conditions, pose changes and jerky motions of the devices,” adds Aakash.

The technology is very high end and will see great acceptance as well. For more details on PredictGaze, check out its website, and Page.