Smarterview Exclusive Interview with Dr. Alexandre Alahi
The SmartView team is proud to release its first interview of Dr Alexandre Alahi expert in video analytics and member of the Stanford Visio Lab. Alexandre is also the founder of VisioSafe, the first hosted video protection service with avant-garde analytics. He has also written several research papers and articles. Some of them have been published in world famous newspapers such as the WallStreet Journal. Last but not least he won several awards in different contests such as the Swissnex Boston Global Pitchfest or the ICDS challenge prize.
Hi Alexandre how are you doing? Thank you
for your time and consideration. Let us start off right away. You are one of
the founders of VisioSafe. Could you briefly describe what your startup is
about?
The goal of our startup is to add another
dimension to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is used to analyze the traffic
of visitors on your website and what we want to do with VisioSafe, is to
analyze visitors in the physical world. We want to fill the gap between the web
and the real world. The success of online e businesses is thanks to analytics.
They make you understand how people navigate on your website, in other words;
what’s their path, how long they stay and what the impact might be of a given
layout. We are applying the same tools for the physical world so a company can
make the same analysis and optimizations.
Due to that we transform cameras in analytic
tools and measure the traffic of people in any area. We use artificial intelligence
to automatically detect and track them on the ground and analyze their
trajectories in real time. The main advantage is that we re not embedding any
devices on the visitors and its also privacy safe since we only capture their
position and coordinates. We don’t track any info about their identities.
Who are your potential clients and how do
they benefit from your technology?
Our clients are retailers and any brick
and mortar companies, malls, exhibitions, airports etc. By the way, we call our
cameras sensors as we use them for data collection. For retailers the benefit is
pretty clear as why to use our technology. Understanding the purchasing path, the
fishing rate, how many people come into your store and do not buy something, identifying
hot spots in your store and how to optimize your layout. This data is most
valuable for retailers and it is the same for malls and exhibitions. Which
stores are generating the most traffic in order to optimize the placement of
your products or stores depending on the traffic.
Airports have the same goal as train
terminals have. They want to reduce the congestion time so you don’t miss the
transit. They generally invest a lot of money in rebuilding their
infrastructure. But for them to do so, they need prior quantitative analysis to
justify the corrections. We are diagnosing the situation and also identifying
how to improve it. Changing infrastructure in airports or train stations is
really expensive so they have to do it right. However in retail stores the cost
is much less. Still the use of video
analytics must be cleverly conducted. If it is, video analytics is the tool
that can help to add value.
Can you show us an example where your
company made a significant impact?
So this information is confidential. But
to give a broad idea, some clients have doubled their revenues by only changing
the layout thanks to the data collected. It is generally known that the way you
present your products has a huge impact on the purchasing process and revenue.
Some stores really make you feel uncomfortable. You enter and you want to leave
again immediately. Others however manage keep customers in their stores, make
you find the products you look for easily and maybe even make you buy things
which you were not even specifically looking for. Hence optimizing the layout
is definitely very important in terms of revenue. On top of that, the
optimization of staff allocation is pretty important too. How much staff do you
need when and where? Here you can surely save a lot of money. Moreover,
analyzing queues and waiting times is critical for airports and train stations.
Simple experiments, e.g. changing light conditions, can help to measure the
impact on the flow of people.
The good thing is that our company offers
a fairly new product and or service which people are not yet used to. So the
clear value we are adding, pretty quickly convinces customers to follow up with
repeated purchases.
What are the key management challenges
when setting up/implementing your technology?
We are offering a cutting edge technology,
which is a result of several years of research. It’s a new service thanks to
the break troughs in artificial intelligence. People are actually still baffled
and impressed when we demonstrate the capabilities of our product. Let me give
you an example with regards to train stations. When we met with the train
station officials for the first time, they tried to find other companies in the
world who could do the same at the same scale. At that time we were the only
ones. Again, our advantage is that we can locate as close as to a few
centimeters. As opposed to a few meters when locating cell phones. And we are
doing it large scale. We are able to track people over a minute or over one
hundred meters. These are pretty nice features I would say, which others are
not offering.
Let’s talk about personal data. Tesco is for
example planning to scan faces of customers to target advertising in store. How
and where do you draw the line between observation and infringing personal
rights?
We all use GPS or elevators… Again, we
are just offering a tool that helps potential customers to analyze the
occupancy of their sites. And all that we do without identifying people. We
don’t know whether it is a woman or a man, we don’t know their age… We only
know about people and their trajectories. And we don’t want to know on purpose.
We don’t want information about people’s identities. Of course when it comes to
mobiles for instance you somehow get identities. And whether that’s good or bad
is another debate. But our technology is not intrusive. Anyway, some of our
customers have cameras installed anyways, for security reasons. And they are
capturing images. We also offer products that help with that respect. But the
analytic tool does not need images. It is the choice of the client whether or
not to capture image data for security reasons. Some already have cameras
installed and we are just helping them to transform their devices into an
analytical tool.
Last but not least what do you think are
the future trends regarding video analytics?
This is a topic, which we have been
working on researching for he past 20 years. Every year the cost of the cameras
decrease. Already two years ago there were 50 million security cameras around
the globe. All this follows the major
topic of big data. The challenge is how to process it! Right? We have all the
data. But we need artificial intelligence, a software or machine, which is able
to understand and act. This pretty much describes my professional field and
that’s what we are trying to do: Creating smart cameras. And there is
definitely still room to make the cameras even smarter, to make them more
human. We are still very far away from what a human brain can do, but at least
we are trying to fill this gap. Cameras need to be able to cluster, recognize,
understand and retrieve information from data. Because in the end it is only
numbers, right? You want to obtain semantic information. You don’t want to
receive an alert that someone is walking; you want to receive an alert about
abnormal behavior.
Well thank you very much Alexandre. That
was pretty insightful.
For all of you that want to stay updated
what Alexandre and VisioSafe are up to in the future, be sure to check out
these links:
