BlinkAI

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SELENA SHEN: My name's Selena Shen. I'm the CEO of BlinkAI Technologies.

BO ZHU: I'm Bo Zhu, and I'm the CTO for BlinkAI.

SELENA SHEN: BlinkAI is a imaging technology company. And we use machine learning to enhance the sense of performance in the visual challenging conditions, extending the range of what camera can see and detect in the real world. So BlinkAI Technologies is a imaging technology. We use machine learning to enhance the sense of performance in the visually challenging conditions.

And which our technologies enables the cars, the smartphones, HeliDrones, to have a better performance in real low light settings, as well as that's visually challenging environment, such as snows, rains, and a foggy type of situation.

BO ZHU: At MIT as an undergrad, a lot of my research was based around trying to improve the noise robustness of automatic speech recognition systems. So how can we improve the performance of speech recognition, like Siri and Google and Alexa, when there's lot of noise in the background. And as PhD student, sort of transitioned a little bit into imaging science. So how can we use MRI to detect cancers better when we have injected contrast agents, such as iron oxide nanoparticles and gadolinium. Sometimes they don't show up in the way that we would like to for a radiologist to see.

And as a postdoc, I was fortunate to really combine these two research directions. Machine learning applied to medical imaging, particularly, how can we create more intelligent scanners and specifically, more intelligent image reconstruction, so that even with rapidly acquired noisy data, from whether it's low dose CT, low dose PET, or just very quickly acquired MRI, still come up with a very clear, high resolution, high clarity image for the radiologist to be able to accurately read and diagnose.

And so it turns out that if we have systems that are more intelligent, that understand what they're about to see, because of that predictive ability, they can rely on much less information and still provide a very accurate image. And so we're taking this precision medical diagnostic technology where it really matters to the patient and to the doctors that are reading these scans, and applying it into areas where there's also safety and critical issues that are only now beginning to become a real problem as technology moves forward, especially in autonomous vehicles and any sort of self-navigating type of system.

What we've done with this breakthrough technology at BlinkAI is to really transfer this paradigm into digital imaging systems. So putting a brain behind the camera sensor so it has a more predictive power to process the information that's often very noisy, especially at nighttime, coming in. And in so doing, really improving the quality of the images that come out by five to 10 times.

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