Knowledge
A future in artificial intelligence: As Blippar’s Mitra sees it
He foresaw artificial intelligence and computer learning way back in 1997 and brought truth to it. He foresees it yet again… the way technology can bridge several gaps that might come up in the next 10-15 years.
Dropping out of high-school to do something meaningful, Ambarish Mitra started his career exploring technology and is now the CEO and co-founder of Blippar, and is widely considered as one of the leaders in visual browser and augmented reality. The company now has more than 250 people operating from more than 10 offices, catering to more than 50 million users.
ScooNews, when presenting at Web Summit’s first event, SURGE 2016 Bengaluru, had a chance to listen and talk to Ambarish Mitra as he discussed about all the upcoming technology and artificial intelligence and how Blippar was leading the market in bringing about a change in mobile phones and its uses.
Mitra, who today is leading the technological arena with his imagination, wonders aloud ‘how and where the world is heading, and how can the majority of the planet actually access information from the information from the world.’ He believes there are two paramount concepts taking it forward, one being computer vision and artificial intelligence, both of which work hand-in-hand to help it progressively grow. He goes on to explain ‘when a computer looks at things, it actually alienates and creates categories and structure’ citing an example right from several highly technical and technological computer labs, ‘where a computer is looking at an environment and is trying to isolate the cattle from grass, roads from buildings. It is the computer’s basic cognition that works as it doesn’t have any further intelligence. Artificial intelligence, the next thing, driven by the machine learning, adds to a computer’s basic cognition. Machine learning, deep computer vision, artificial intelligence, etc, have thus become the buzz words that the world is about to hear a lot for the next 10 to 20 years, as against the till-now hyped phrases, e-commerce, ssl pages, secure socket layers, etc, which were iconic and dominating the last 15 to 18 years of formative years of internet. But the next generation of internet is massively going to be driven by programs and self-learning. So machine learning is actually a subset of the bigger concept of artificial intelligence that actually allows computer algorithms to autonomously study data and information and take positions. All these programming and algorithms can sometimes go out of control, though can be rewritten and reset, which ultimately makes artificial intelligence smarter over a period of time.
It’s not just the technology that is growing, the world’s population and the population’s laze too is on an ever-high. When 50 years back, a country had calculated 2 billion people, and today has reached 10 billion, and the rest of the world following suit, how are we planning to cope-up with the gaps thus being created. A space crunch, land crunch, crunch of doctors, teachers, knowledge crunch, crunch in proper infrastructure policies for the growing number of metros, it all can be well visualised, with most of the governments across the globe not yet waking up to this call.
So we believe artificial intelligence and computer vision could be strong contributors. Not only for the most prominent of issues that we foresee but also for the most basic of knowledge that we’d like our 1 to 5 year olds to be empowered with.
Agriculture, something that our latest generation doesn’t even bother about, but can this lethargy in agriculture be long tolerated? Farmers could be given devices or even robots for day-to-day farming, which today are being developed at low costs, ranging between $20 and 30, for advice on irrigation and weather predictions.
Come to think of national security, latest technology has become an integral part of the system here as well. However, national security is still manually manoeuvred, and because of a lack of enough human resources, we miss out on real-time predictions. This gap can be filled by artificial intelligence.
Yeah, that’s what Mitra is actually known for, his love for technology, unconventional ideas, helping manpower, towards an easier world! One of his efforts today is called Blippar, we look forward to many more!