S3EP16: Deploying Visual AI at the Edge

Visual AI at the edge is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, even reaching some traditionally lower tech sectors like gas station convenience stores. In this conversation, Bill sits down with Sridhar Sudarsan, the CTO at SparkCognition, to discuss their visual AI products and how they have been deployed at scale throughout gas stations and how they are using visual AI to enhance school safety. They dive into ethical considerations of visual AI at the edge and how SparkCognition thinks about operations in addition to model training.

Key Quotes: 

“These AI systems are really a tool that helps the human, who then helps the AI systems, who then helps the human. And we're constantly pushing the barrier to raise the bar.”

“From an industry perspective, Murphy's Law continues to apply and I think we continue to find hardware getting less and less expensive, more processing happening at lower costs.”

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Show Timestamps:

(01:18) How did Sridhar get started in technology?

(02:16) Sridhar’s time at IBM

(10:45) Visual AI use cases at gas stations

(18:13) Using existing camera infrastructure

(20:43) Developing an economic model to deploy edge AI

(25:11) ROI calculator

(29:02) Privacy and visual AI in schools

(34:32) Training ethical AI

(40:46) Sridhar’s favorite deployments

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Sponsor:

Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

Credits:

Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.

Links: 

Follow Bill on LinkedIn

Connect with Sridhar Sudarsan on LinkedIn