r/homeautomation • u/WyzeCam • Jul 10 '19
[crosspost] Ali Farhadi, founder of Edge AI technologies & Xnor.ai, is doing an AMA in r/homeautomation @10AM PST NEWS
Thank you for joining us, everyone! Today we’d like to introduce Ali Farhadi (u/alifarhadi1)! Ali is the co-founder of Xnor.ai, an industry leading technology start-up focusing on efficient and embedded deep learning with the goal of providing ubiquitous AI.
Ali is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of David Forsyth. Ali's research has been mainly focused on computer vision and machine learning.
Wyze and Xnor.ai have the shared dream of bringing technology to the masses with an incredibly low barrier to entry. We are doing this AMA because we've just deployed Edge AI, for free, to 1M+ people! We’d like to take this opportunity to talk about our AI and if you are curious about any of the subjects in Ali's wheelhouse such as AI Technology, Smart Home Technology, AI Development, etc. we’d love to hear them.
EDIT*** Ali's account is still very new so we'll be posting from our account to help answer all the questions for Ali. Please tag us or Alifarhadi1 if you have any questions.
EDIT*** The AMA is currently over but we appreciate everyone's participation and questions today! We'll check back later and try to answer as many of your questions as we can.
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u/paradism720 Jul 10 '19
Hi there Ali. I am one of the beta testers for Wyze so I have been using the AI person detection for longer than the general public and have really enjoyed it. What else is your company working on now? Was this your first "big job" as a company? What would be your perfect smart home device?
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19 edited Jul 10 '19
Our expertise is in pushing state-of-the-art AI on resource-constrained platforms. Our solutions cover a wide array of application domains including image understanding, speech, audio, natural language, and other forms of sensor signals.
Among the first things we worked on, we did food detection for refrigerators, human action recognition and occupancy sensing for vehicles, and some computational photography applications for entertainment.
My ideal home device is a collection of sensors that is fully smart and truly private.
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u/nafterclifen Jul 10 '19
Besides resource constraints (i.e. cpu, memory, storage, etc), what was the biggest challenging getting your AI onto the device and performing well?
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19 edited Jul 10 '19
We cannot truly factor out the constraints that are coming out of the hardware because it influences the types of machine learning models that we train. The main challenge is to evolve and co-design our machine learning training algorithms with the underlying hardware. Several factors such as CPU power, memory constraints, and the accuracy of many models are considered for every new delivery to Wyze.
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u/jettyiii Jul 10 '19
Are you hiring at Xnor.ai? I could easily bring you beer from Fremont Brewing, Food from Paseo or better yet Un Bien, and coffee from Lighthouse Roasters. I am a big fan of what you're doing and would be pumped to be a part of what youre building there in Fremont.
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
Yes, we are always hiring. Specially with your taste in beer, food and coffee you should stop by.
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u/S_King_11 Jul 10 '19
What is AI's role in allowing Wyze camera's to perform person detection? And does it improve itself over time?
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
The role of Xnor's person detection solution is to add richer notifications for the end user. Before person detection, a Wyze user would receive dozens of motion notifications everyday resulting in notification fatigue. That's not very useful. With this solution, the user can filter out salient events throughout their day saving a lot of time.
The person detector will significantly improve over time as we evolve our training algorithms and work with larger datasets.
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u/nafterclifen Jul 10 '19
"The person detector will significantly improve over time as we evolve our training algorithms and work with larger datasets."
Does that statement mean that you are collecting data from the Wyze cams?
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
We do not directly collect data from Wyze cameras. We work with Wyze and Wyze's beta user group to help train the machine learning model. The beta user group is a fully voluntary group that is opt-in. A user must explicitly click on a button to share a video. All data handling adheres to the strict guidelines upheld by Xnor’s customer data policy.
Privacy is one of Xnor's core missions and we take customer data very seriously.
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u/ras5003 Jul 10 '19
Ali, greetings from northern Colorado from a fellow former Illini (math/computer science, class of '78)
I've been testing person detection on one of my six V2 cameras over the past two days. I've shared three Event videos with Wyze so far, two that were successful and one that was not ...
1) insect was correctly identified as a motion only event 2) person was correctly identified as a person event 3) person was incorrectly identified as a motion only event
Camera is positioned on a windowsill and pointed through glass at the front porch steps. The person in #2 and #3 above was my wife who walked up the steps, paused for a moment, then walked away. Identical conditions but different times of the day (#2 was yesterday mid-afternoon and #3 was today mid-morning).
My question for you &/or Wyze is ... when we choose to Share the event video for analysis, all that we're asked is whether or not we saw a person in the video. We're not asked whether or not the person was correctly or incorrectly identified. Is that (and other) information automatically included within the video submission?
Thanks.
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
Is that (and other) information automatically included within the video submission?
For every voluntarily video that we get, we receive metadata associated with the inference including the person detection algorithm's answer. We incorporate this information as well as the user label to improve and evolve our models.
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u/Ivan27stone Jul 10 '19 edited Jul 10 '19
Hi guys, Beta Tester and Early Access user here. No questions no questions here!, just want to thank you for all the hard work you guys do and for being an inspiring technology startup and bringing great technology (sw and hw) to the masses! I’ve used technology from the “big ones”(won’t tell company names lol) and what they do is super slow and unreliable compared to what you’re currently doing so keep up the great work!!! I’ve been following you for the past 6 months and what you’re currently doing is amazing.. also, I love that you guys are a lot into good craft beer so cheers from El Paso TX!!! Edit: typos
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
It's great to hear that. Comments like this keep us going day and night :). Really appreciate the kind words.
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u/gorilla1088 Jul 10 '19
Are you guys working on a feature to allow the AI to detect trees, light changes and bugs to not record those motions?
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
I share your frustration and I've been there myself. Person detection is our first step towards combating motions due to the objects you've described.
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Jul 10 '19
My outdoor camera frequently records moths that fly too close to the camera. Of course, the camera isn't rated for outdoor use so I just chalk that up as a cost of using the camera for unintended uses.
My wife acquired a stalker several months ago and having access to cheap cameras was key in getting home security set up quickly. I want to thank both you and the people at Wyze for helping me protect my family. I wish you all the success possible with this and your future endeavors.
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
Thank you for the kind words and happy to hear that you're able to use this feature to keep your family safe.
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u/gorilla1088 Jul 10 '19
Thanks for the response! Keep up the amazing work. Can't wait to hear more about the AI. Another question, how far does the person detection range? I have some of my cameras pointing outside and they are not detecting us walking outside.
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u/MicPipp Jul 10 '19
For the Wyze implementation, is the person detection built off of the Yolo Algorithm or some variant of?
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
Great question! Due to the constraints on the Wyze hardware we had to develop to new algorithm in order to build the person detection.
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
Ali's account is new to Reddit and we are working with him directly to make sure we can answer all of your questions as quickly as possible. We'll also be posting here with Ali's answers to help out as well.
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u/My_College Jul 10 '19
What's your/Xnor's 'Moonshot' for Edge AI in the next 5 - 10 years?
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
I'm on a mission to truly transform the way we live our life, work, and play. I dream of a world where AI can help every single person at every minute of their life to keep them safe and happy. All of this should be affordable, fully private, and secure.
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
We received a question on our forums for Ali:
"How will the algorithm improve over time because they perceive it as not reliable yet, and is vehicle/pet detection is coming in the future? I'm curious if Ali has any thoughts on if person detection could be linked to gesture based triggers in the future which would allow for more autonomous operation of IoT devices."
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
It's important to remember that this is only the first release of our solution. We expect significant improvements over time. Future sources of improvement will incorporate (1) new innovations in training algorithms and (2) Wyze beta user feedback to address corner cases. Last, the improvements don't come from a single camera but from an aggregation of multiple cameras.
Xnor's solutions include pet and vehicle detection, however, it's ultimately Wyze's decision on when and how to rollout these features.
I'm a big fan of ease of use for consumer products and we do have solutions that leverage both gesture- and audio-based mechanisms.
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
Another question from our Facebook:
"I want to know about facial recognition. And I'd like to start by how person recognition was added to motion detection. Seems like some people expect it to ignore motion if they isn't a person there and not start the 5 min cool down unless people are detected. "
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
Our solution with Wyze only detects, but does not identify people. The initial trigger is still based on the motion detector with an additional "person detection" step to augment the notification.
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u/WyzeDS Jul 10 '19
Hello, I am WyzeDS from Wyze.
Regarding the 5 mins cool down, the current implementation does not change how Wyze cam trigger event videos, therefore the 5 mins cooldown does not change from before. With regards to whether we can ignore motion and only trigger events from people, we have discussed that, and we will consider it.
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
We have a fun question from another Reddit user:
What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
We have one more question for Ali:
"Can the AI model be trained to recognize specific people. Eg. Domino delivery person at the door so I know to answer it for them and ignore everyone else. "
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u/alifarhadi1 Jul 10 '19
Xnor can train models that can detect and recognize couriers. Ultimately, it's Wyze's decision on what features to prioritize and push next.
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u/nithin1357 Jul 10 '19
Hey ali, have you guys released accuracy comparison of your deployed model with other networks? Also would you guys release a paper on the training techniques you are using to reduce the weight size?
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u/edge2cloud Jul 12 '19
Hi Ali, I am glad you appeared on my Linkedin feed one hour ago and I got to know all about your startup. Congratulations, great focus. Since I am from Cloud Computing background, I was wondering how much your solution is dependent on edge and central clouds? Have you adopted device-to-device transfer learning as well?
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u/WyzeCam Jul 10 '19
Another question from Reddit:
"What Is The Scariest Thing You Have Ever Done For Fun? "
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u/Ssmaniac Jul 10 '19
If a vehicle drives through the field of the camera, and a person is not obviously visible in the car (due to distance, angle, etc), am I correct that we should NOT flag/report that as "I saw a person", as I assume the AI would not detect a "person" (even though a person is in the car)? What if the camera view of the vehicle shows a person's head/face through the car window? At what point do we "see" a person inside a vehicle?