Exclusive Talk with Serhat Cillidag, Co-Founder and CTO of Intenseye

Serhat is Co-Founder and CTO of Intenseye. He was previously working as a software engineer in Sony, delivering their web platforms for millions of users. He has four years of experience with computer vision and three years in Deep Learning. Now his passion is to prevent incidents and improve overall safety in workplaces.

Asif. Tell us about Intenseye and your journey so far.

Serhat: Before Intenseye, with my co-founder Sercan, we were working at Sony, developing artificial intelligence and web platforms to serve millions of global clients. After that, we left our jobs to establish Intenseye in August 2018. We saw the need for computer vision applications in many industries but the challenge was applying real-time analytics in existing camera infrastructure. Therefore, we spent almost a year developing our video processing engine which is capable of integrating with over 200 camera make and models today easily. Meanwhile, we get in touch with many customers and discover the best use case for our platform: Health & Safety. 

 All around the world, every 7 seconds a worker is injured on the job. Companies lost over 160 billion dollars only in 2018 due to direct injury costs, insurance premiums increase, lost productivity and compliance fines. All manufacturers can do is staying compliant with the regulations but even so, human error is the biggest challenge. Now with Intenseye, we turn existing cameras into health and safety specialists with superpowers to automate inspections, notify teams in real-time to prevent unsafe acts. 

 After launching our platform in September 2019, now we are onboarding our first enterprise customers around the world with multiple facilities. 

Asif: How is Intenseye bringing its AI technology in a way that is different from its competitors?

Serhat: Software adoption of workplace safety has always been difficult. Many companies still operate on paper processes or basic electronic forms. The software currently we have is able to replace it however unable to automate it. Our AI technology basically gives EHS Specialists to ensure safety is in place without even being there. Traditional solutions for AI and computer vision usually involve long-term deployments and heavy investments. We use existing cameras in facilities to analyze and give feedback on real-time.

Asif: Please share with our viewers how Intenseye connects cameras in manufacturing facilities to analyze workers’ body posture, danger zone violations, etc..

Serhat: Intenseye AI algorithms are deployed frequently. And by being able to utilize cloud we are able to combine many algorithms to solve different problems. Our video ingestion service retrieves the video feed from each camera and passes them over to the required algorithms. All of the models are actually trained from the footages retrieved from real-world cameras with real-world workers, thus achieving very high accuracy. The layout of the workplace constantly changes so we are providing the ability to adjust our algorithms with a simple drag and drop fashion.

Asif: Can you shed some light on the latest employment trends related to Artificial Intelligence and Analytics? Is your company hiring new talent?

Serhat: We are always looking for anyone who wants to research and develop AI for a use case that would save lives. Many tech companies introduce machine learning to increase their value proposition and creating many more jobs in the field. In universities, AI course involvement is growing rapidly, the number of research papers that are sent to conferences is also increasing each year. The tooling has also improved a lot. However, the field is still lacking in bringing the applied research into production.

Asif: What is the state of security and privacy with Intenseye?

Serhat: Security and privacy are always our top priority. For our security, we are using encryption for all communication between cameras and our internal network. We never store the frames, so there is no way to get a physical copy of the video feed. Also regularly we are going through an extensive penetration test that covers internal, external and application-level testing. The result of penetration testing is provided for all of our clients. For privacy, we have started our company fully aware of GDPR so protecting the privacy of individuals is the most important thing for us. We never store the videos and our algorithms work fully anonymously and never store any biometric data. We don’t also use facial recognition as our algorithm uses the visual cues from all features across the body.

Asif: What other areas, apart from the workplace, do you think Intenseye’s technology will have an impact on?

Serhat: Health and Safety are not only big for workplaces. We are aiming to bring safety to any environment with accident/incident risk. Also, we are working exclusively on IP cameras. Working with cameras usually involves strange lightning and angles. By using our algorithms we are aiming to bring AI to any camera.

Asif: Share your vision for Intenseye for the next five years.

Serhat: We are looking to be a complete EHS platform powered by computer vision, machine learning, and real-time data analytics, in order to prevent incidents, reduce insurance premiums and save lost productivity. We want to manage entire EHS and risk assessment processes by enabling real-time analytics along with compliance across multiple facilities. Our aim is to become an industry standard for manufacturing and warehouse facilities.

Asif: What are your views about MarkTechPost.com?

Serhat: It seems like a great website with solid content. It is definitely a must-follow for anyone in the field.