We sat down with trailblazing leaders to learn about what they do, how they measure success, and what it means to be a leader today. Helen Qiao is the CEO of AIH Technology Inc., an AI computer vision company that offers Facial Recognition as a Service (FRaaS) through its facial recognition algorithm. Read more interviews in this series here.
Why is now the time for your company to exist?
Our mission is to apply our state-of-the-art computer vision AI to solve real-world problems and empower our customers and partners to improve their productivity, efficiency, and security. Image and video data are growing at an exponential rate. Infrastructure support, such as cheaper storage and computation costs, makes it easy for AI computer vision algorithms to run. Unlike human eyes and brains, an AI computer vision algorithm can process gigabytes (even terabytes) of data without compromising accuracy due to fatigue, and it can do it in less than one thousandth of time required by human brains. There’s huge demand for video analytics services, and the cost of providing video analytic services is becoming cheaper and easier to deliver than ever before. This is the perfect time for entry and for us to build this company.
How do you measure success?
We want to make highly robust and computationally intensive AI computer vision algorithms accessible to service and application providers. Ideally, our algorithms would help enterprises and government agencies streamline their current business processes. For instance, governments might want to protect citizens’ privacy by redacting people’s faces in video disclosures. Traditionally, this would take an unsustainable number of staff hours to review which faces should be redacted. With our technology, the process could be automated. We would consider ourselves successful if our technology played a role in enterprise and government automation processes.
What does it mean to be a leader today?
Being a leader means not only making contributions to the entire team, but also motivating other team members to do the same. It means bringing out the best potential of each and every team member, and creating synergistic potentials, where the sum of our team work is more than its constituent parts. In short, being a leader means bringing out the best in people.
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