Blindsight → About
The Company
Blindsight is an R&D/product firm based near the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California. The leadership team includes a luminary in computer vision and two Harvard Ph.D. entrepreneurs who have each launched and developed successful companies and products in high-tech and healthcare. Recently, we have brought one of the first-wave pioneers in market-oriented web design on board as our UI lead.
We have been working on applying computer vision to assist the blind for over 10 years. One of our key contributions is an object detection algorithm that is tuned to find text in natural environments Over the last two years, we have expanded into distributed assistance services. Our human factors partners include prominent institutes for visual disability and aging.
We are the grateful beneficiaries of numerous Federal Small Business Innovation Research grants.
Our principals work from Berkeley and Belmont, California, but we will add space in San Francisco or Silicon Valley as needed.
The Project
Millions of people in the US have reduced mobility and independence from aging and/or loss of vision. As activities of daily living become more difficult or impossible for these people, help from family or paid in-home care is the only option that allows them to continue to live a full life outside of an institution. There is no middle ground between dependent life at home and living in an institution.
Blindsight is staking out that middle ground. The service we’re hiring to build will help restore mobility and extend independent life for millions of blind, low-vision and elderly people.
While bench prototypes of similar products have been built in a number of labs and universities all over the world in the last few years, none have yet brought effective remote assistance to a broad market.
The challenge is to provide assistance remotely with effectively zero error at minimal cost. That’s why we’re running this as an ambitious startup, with frequent product iterations and market tests, and a total focus on delivering assistance under real-world conditions; e.g. spotty 3G coverage, noisy streets, clients who confuse right and left, etc.
Our field-trial prototypes have used mildly-modified smart phones and standard hosted Linux servers, with software written in Flex, Rails and Symbian. The production system is likely, but not certain, to use cloud-based CentOS systems, and a mix of front-end (Rails), backend (Scala or Clojure), and signal processing (C++) apps, tied to a hosted CCXML telco app. Production mobile clients may be custom devices outsourced to a third party.
The People
Mark Nitzberg, Ph.D.
President and Co-Founder
Scientist and entrepreneur, Mark is a co-inventor on 21 U.S. patents related to image encoding and medical technologies, and has co-founded several technology companies. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University.
Peter W. Hallinan, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator and Venture Partner
Peter has over twenty-five years of hands-on experience in management, entrepreneurship and product development. Over the past ten years he has co-founded, co-funded and/or co-developed new ventures in healthcare, digital media, finance and oil, and has led the the development of numerous complex, cloud-based products for clients of Assembla Consulting. Previously, he managed engagement teams at Analysis Group / Integral, where he solved problems in innovation management, disruptive technologies and growth strategy for clients in the communications, computing and life science industries.
Peter is an expert in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, and has co-authored a book on face recognition. He has spoken on numerous occasions on technology and strategy issues, and has taught life science entrepreneurship at the Stanford University School of Medicine and policy analysis at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Peter holds A.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University.
Frank Wippich
Product Development Manager
Frank brings extensive practical experience leading complex hardware and software R&D projects in Europe, Asia and the US. Taking concepts from initiation to real products, he has supervised the development of products in connectivity and audio solutions.
Frank holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering and Technology Management from University of Huddersfield (UK) and a degree in Industrial Engineering from Jena University of Applied Sciences (Germany). He is currently pursuing an MBA at Henley Business School (UK).
Stellan Lagerström
Senior Product Engineer
Stellan has designed and built software for a range of practical products including satellites and specialized web applications, notably the Zezame annotation server. Stellan studied Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden.
Alan L. Yuille, Ph.D.
Chief Consulting Scientist and Co-Founder
Alan wrote his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University in 1980. After post-doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, The Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, and the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, he joined the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he became an Associate Professor. Alan also spent several years as a senior scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. He is currently a professor at UCLA.
Alan has over one hundred and thirty peer-reviewed publications on vision, neural networks, and physics and has co-authored two books.
Harris “Hutch” Fishman
Finance Advisor
Hutch Fishman is currently CFO of cMarket, Inc. He has worked with a number of high-profile emerging and publicly held companies within diverse industries including software, telecommunications, and new media.
Hutch has served as the founding CFO of the following companies: Sonus Networks (Nasdaq-SONS), the FamilyEducation Network (acquired by Pearson), Viaweb (acquired by Yahoo!), Winphoria Networks (acquired by Motorola), and VideoServer (Nasdaq-EZEN). Hutch, a certified public accountant, was previously a senior manager at Deloitte & Touche and co-founder of the Boston office’s High Technology and Emerging Business Group.