Sam Fuller, Senior Director of Marketing at Flex Logix, was both a speaker and a sponsor at our Computer Vision Summit.
“One thing I like about AIAI is that it's not just face-to-face; there's a very strong social media component to the AI offerings.“
In this case study, Sam discusses:
- Why he signed up to be a speaker
- Why he chose our event
- His favorite part
- The key outcomes
- Why other AI experts should sign up
Q: Why did you sign up as a speaker at the Computer Vision (CV) Summit?
A: We signed up to speak at the CV Summit mainly because we wanted to get our message out. We'd like people to understand our technology and solution offerings. We saw the event as a forum for us to meet with both partners and customers who are looking to add computer vision functionality to whatever problem they're trying to solve.
We're looking for companies that recognize that computer vision, and especially machine learning AI-based computer vision, can help them improve their product, and we wanted to introduce ourselves and our technology to companies in the industry.
Q: Why did you choose AIAI’s event?
A: One thing I like about AIAI is that it's not just face-to-face; there's a very strong social media component to the AI offerings. That allows for longevity of the message, as well as a broader base of participants and listeners. I looked at it as a way to meet with customers, but I think the difference between AIAI and a lot of the other companies I work with is targeting.
There's a different channel to market with AIAI events, that identifies other sets of users who are interested in this technology, and represent, frankly, a younger demographic as well. One that’s more likely to adopt new technologies like artificial intelligence-based vision solutions.
Q: What was your favorite part of the CV Summit? And have you taken anything from it to your day-to-day work, for example?
A: I think one of my favorite things was that we were able to meet with a couple of companies. It wasn't hundreds, but there were three or four companies there that were quite interested in what we're doing.
We've also been able to follow up with them. And we're progressing to see if we have a solution for their problems, which is what we intended to do. I didn't catch all of the sessions, but it was interesting to understand the companies better, which were talking about their training solutions or their datasets, and recognize computer vision has many components.
We built a co-processor solution that accelerates machine-learning mathematics. That's a necessary piece to being able to do this work, because it’s not efficient to do it on just general-purpose processors. It takes a lot longer than it should, and so there's an approach to building silicon, which is much more efficient at processing these workloads.
And we think we're really good at that. But that's not the only thing that needs to be done; there are companies that are developing models. And they're always looking at the various trade-offs of trying to get the best accuracy out of the least amount of computation. There are also companies in the dataset training space that are developing the data used to train the models that run on the accelerators we provide.
It's not a “one company does it all.” And these various companies need to be aware of what each other is doing, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what the approaches are. That’ll help us to develop what I think will be the best solutions in the industry if we have opportunities like this to work with each other, and with the customers.
We all have to understand the end-use cases and the big problems that need to be solved. This guides us in the development of the various technologies we're developing. It all has to tie together. There need to be forums like this, so we're able to find each other, understand what we're doing, understand what others are doing, and make sure that we're all headed in the right direction.
Q: What were the key outcomes for you?
A: The main key outcome was to identify customers for our technology (people who want to be able to leverage what we're doing). Then, we’ll understand if we have a solution that works for them, but also for partners and ecosystems.
Q: Why do you think other AI experts should sign up to speak at AIAI events?
A: We can build the industry faster if we have more experts. I've been to a lot of various events this past year. There's the Embedded Vision Summit, which is focused on this space, and AIAI’s Computer Vision Summit, which was a bit of a different spin. It's a little more intimate.
From my perspective, the CV Summit is actually a little more productive compared to other events for us to find customers and talk to people. A lot of the other larger trade show events I've been to, like ModEx and the Embedded Vision Summit, don’t focus on computer vision alone. So, it's a lot harder; you'll find maybe 4-5% of the companies scattered amongst an event doing computer vision work.
Whereas AIAI’s Computer Vision Summit was more focused specifically on this topic. Other AI experts should sign up to speak so that the CV Summit can grow and we get even more participation, and support.
