Advancing Computer Vision with Komal Devjani and Liz Oz

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on. Startups get the party. Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador. And together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party.

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, and I am joined by the team at AlwaysAI. Liz and Kumal, thanks for being here.

Hey, Neil, thanks for having us.

Hi, Neil. Thank you.

Yeah, it's so good to have you guys with us. You know, it's great to get to know a local tech company that is doing some pretty amazing things for the tech community specifically. And so we want to get to know, like, what are you working on? Liz, do you want to give us a quick overview of what always AI is?

Absolutely. First, before we dive into what always AI is doing, let me first start by stating what computer vision is. For those who don't know that may be listening to. So computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence, AI that gives sight to computers. So it essentially allows computers to identify images in videos like humans do with their eyes. So if you think about self driving cars, for example, they're using computer vision to process images in real time to steer the car and prevent collisions. And that's just one of many, many use cases of computer vision. We at AlwaysAI, we provide developers and enterprises a platform for creating these computer vision applications, iterating on them and deploying them really quickly to the edge onto IoT devices.

Awesome. We're going to dive deep into the development of that kind of the idea and all the different application uses. But let's get to know you guys a little bit. Where are each of your backgrounds? I know one of you. Liz, you sit in the marketing world. Kumal, you're in kind of the developer relations and advocacy area. Liz, where'd you grow up and how did you end up down this path?

Yeah, thanks. Great question. It's been a journey. So I was born in upstate New York, moved away from there with my family when I was young, and I grew up in the Seattle, Puget Sound area, went to school there. I studied multimedia design and advertising. And then I spent about five years after that working in digital and marketing agencies, getting my feet wet, learning the ropes, after which I've spent the past decade running my own design and marketing consultancy called Punchy. I worked with a lot of small businesses and startups to define and grow their brand, help them execute marketing campaigns, and also design and build digital products. And now I'm here at the intersection of that all working with Always AI. I've been working with Always AI for over a year now. Started off as a consultant, working through my business, and I was brought on full time back in December to lead their marketing department. And I'm really excited about it, you know, working in marketing, design, tech and innovation. It's really appealing to me and I'm really happy where my career has led me to this point.

Yeah, that's pretty strong conviction for a company that, you know, when you had your own business, your own consultancy, you. You dive all in on a company. So that, that says a lot. That's pretty incredible. Come on, tell us a little about your background.

Yeah, so I actually was born in India and I came to the States when I was really young. I grew up in LA most of my life and went up to Berkeley and studied political science. Shortly after, I realized I was really passionate about tech. And I got involved in various different tech companies, including AT&T and Saatchi. And Saatchi, an agency. And most recently I was a product manager@Engineer AI and that kind of brought me to the world of AI and I met Marty and joined as a developer advocate at Always AI. So now I'm essentially working as the go to to help really foster that developer community and help help us grow in that area and help us grow the developer community.

That's interesting. Tell us a bit more what that role entails. Because, you know, developer advocate, it's not a title you see everywhere. Curious. You know, what is your role like day to day?

Yeah, so on a day to day I, I essentially work with our team here to learn about the best ways we can, we can leverage our platform and help developers use the platform to build computer vision products. And then I also act as the voice of the developer and really bring in the feedback and any information information we learn about developers, what they're working on, where we are in the broader industry and help kind of like facilitate what our marketing messaging should be like and where we should be heading in terms of product development and what are the needs within the industry and what developers are looking for.

Got it. Okay, so when was AlwaysAI actually started and founded?

AlwaysAI was founded in 2018 by Marty Beard, who's our CEO, and Steve Grisett, who's our CTO. They've known each other since they were kids, which is pretty endearing to think about. So they have a long history that goes way back. They're both really experienced and they have had large careers in tech including BlackBerry and Oracle SAP. They're both very, very neat people and great to work with. Steve is very hands on for a cto. He's still coding, doing hacky hours with us on Thursday. So it's a great team that they've got built up. There's about 20 of us now in the company.

And was this developer advocacy and community built in from the very beginning or is it something that came, came up kind of down the road once you saw that you needed that in between connection with the user?

Yeah. So, you know, starting right, right off the bat, I believe Marty and Steve identified that there was a need to kind of bridge that gap between the company as well as the. Because we are a developer focused platform and I believe we hired Jason, who was a developer advocate before me and just to kind of lead that effort. We were in beta stage at that point, just really informing the community about Always AI. What are some of the things you can do with computer vision? And the developer advocacy team led a Lot of hackathons. So we brought Always AI, the computer vision platform, to a lot of these student hackathons and learn about what is it that these students are using Always AI for, what are some of the ways that they're leveraging computer vision for solving real world problems.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And I think actually the three of us met together. You, me and Jason met at a hockey game, right?

Yeah, exactly.

In Orange county about a year ago.

Yep.

With you guys out in the community with a group of ctos. Which was awesome to see you, you know, out in the wild building community just like that.

Why wasn't I invited?

We'll get you to the next one, Liz. For sure. Okay, so you obviously been cultivating a really strong user base of developers. Like, what are some of the interesting applications that you've seen of lbci?

Yeah, so the applications range in various industries from robotics to the marine industry, healthcare, agriculture, waste management, and we've seen some really cool applications focused on consumer analytics. So really learning about the ways in which customers are responding to physical goods and products and learning about how, how that process can be improved, how the products can be improved to better serve the customers. So that's been a really interesting use case. We've also seen marine drones be created to survey the ocean floor and learn about anything going on within the ocean and also potentially like saving people who might be caught and trapped there. So rescue technologies, consumer analytics technology. So it's like a very horizontal phenomena. We recognize that computer vision can really be helpful in multiple industries.

Interesting. I feel like we should get a little bit of an explanation of kind of the product itself. So how are typically like developers tapping in and utilizing this and even discovering it, and a certain way of saying, oh, this exists, we should plug it into our product.

So basically there's three components of the platform. So I think it's really important to highlight what Always AI is all about. The first piece is the model. So we have a really well built out catalog of computer vision models that can be customized using always AIs APIs. So we have a list of Python APIs that can enable you to customize a computer vision application for your specific use case. And because it's so customizable. Right. So you can go from customizing your model to detect certain things to customizing the application to actually work and function in the way that you want it to, and then ultimately and ultimately deploy onto an edge device that out into the field where, where work and life is happening, where data is being generated. It's really Easy to just take a model, use a framework, customize it for your specific use case to identify the things that you're specifically looking for and build that in a containerized environment. So that's really where always AI excels. We've built this containerized environment for developers to build out their applications and use that environment and just deploy the entire application onto an edge device so that there is information being collected on the edge in the field and it can be actionable immediately. Real time.

Yeah. So let me give the viewers that are listening that may not be quite as savvy in the computer vision area. I'll give an analogy. Think of it like you're cooking a meal. Well, first you would have to find a recipe. Then you would have to go to the grocery store, you'd have to comb the aisles, find all the ingredients that you need. You'd have to check out and drive home or walk home, chop up and prepare all the materials and cook it together and then serve it onto a plate. And so if you think about our platform like that, we're taking something that's very complex, computer vision is very complex and we're simplifying, we're making it easy for you. So it's as if somebody went to the store, brought all those things home to you, cooked them and delivered it right to you. So our platform is, it's very flexible and it's very modular and we make something that can be really daunting and complex and we make it super easy so you can get up and running really fast.

Got it. Good explanations on both sides. Appreciate it. Sounds like you're seeing a lot of pretty wide or as you mentioned, horizontal breadth of applications. Are you seeing growth in specific areas that you're starting to focus on and is that going to change or maybe that's directing kind of this near term future growth of what the company's focused on right now.

Definitely. So in the space of customer analytics, as Komal mentioned, so in that there's retail, there's grocery stores, there's qsr, we're seeing tremendous growth taking place there. And those are huge markets right now. They want to use this to improve the customer experience end to end, so you can think about providing businesses operational intelligence so that they can do more effective marketing, improving their customer experience overall, creating their better opportunities within their space. So take a retail environment. If you had analytics on the foot traffic of where people were spending more time, you could put products on the front of the shelf where people would find them more easily. So that kind of information is really valuable for retailers.

Got it.

Also, we're seeing a lot of growth in health and safety. So that's PPE detection, checkpoints and making sure industrial warehouses are safe and secure. We're seeing a lot of potential there also.

Interesting. And I think you've been doing specific to the pandemic like you just mentioned, in this other areas. Did you talk about that you're going to be doing an event on this coming up soon?

Yeah. So on March 31st at 10:30, we're going to be hosting a webinar where we're going to be showcasing some innovative uses of computer vision, specifically how computer vision can improve the vaccine distribution process. So we're going to cover the end to end vaccine process and how computer vision can help across the three major stages. So improving the wait times, assuring accurate tracking of the actual vaccinations once they've happened to afterward, monitoring people who are vaccinated. So we're going to have a MD candidate and she's also a vaccine distribution volunteer. She's going to come come onto the panel and talk to us a little bit about her experiences. And I'm super excited about it. It's going to be a great webinar and I think it's going to help people understand how computer vision can be used in some really creative ways that maybe people are not considering yet.

Yeah, just hearing the applications for them, how broad they are, this is super exciting. So we'll make sure we put a link to the event in the show notes and get our listeners there because we know we've got a lot of technologists as listeners here. So thanks for sharing that, you know, always. AI is a San Diego, Southern California company, which we wouldn't be who we are if it wasn't for our food, including our tacos. And we got to know both of you. Kamal, what's your favorite taco spot?

Okay, well, if I had to pick a spot, the only one spot, I would pick my kitchen. I make really amazing, impossible vegan tacos and I make it with mango salsa and some like vegan chipotle mayo. It's amazing. It's probably the best tacos I've ever had. But if I had to pick a spot outside of my kitchen, I would pick Holy guacamole. It's in Venice beach and they have a poster inside of their, inside of their chain that's like a God's gift to humanity being guacamole. So it's like the angels offering humans guacamole. It's beautiful.

No, I think we're going for homemade. So let us know when the taco party starts.

Yeah.

Liz, how about you?

So I'm gonna have to go with Pokes. Do you know Pokes?

Yeah, good one.

Yeah, I have to go with that one because I actually designed their website.

Ah, yes. Hopefully they paid you in tacos too.

Yeah, I did that with Tragic media back in 2020.

Oh, awesome. Yeah, great team over there. We love Rich and team. Yeah, definitely. Hope you got some taco perks out of that. But thank you both so much for being on. It's quite a pleasure to meet you, get to know you a little bit and get to know Always AI, another great company in town and we're looking forward to this webinar to learn not only some new applications, but things that can help us, you know, like just around the corner here. You never know when the next pandemic is coming and we gotta. We gotta make sure we come over to Kumals for taco party. We gotta be vaccinated first.

Yes, yes.

Excited for the webinar for new developers to take hold of this and, you know, see what new technologies we create. So thank you both for being on.

Thank you so much, Neil.

Thanks, Neil. Thanks so much for having us.

Absolutely.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as Fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech. You know, we got it.

Hey, Ra.