One of my oldest (as in “known for the longest time”) friends – Dave Jilk – recently started a new company called eCortex with his business partner, CU Boulder Professor Randall O’Reilly. I – along with several other friends and The University of Colorado (through their Proof-of-Concept Investment program) – participated in the angel financing.
I’ve known Dave since my second day at MIT. I was a lost and lonely freshman during the madness known as MIT Rush (MIT used to have fraternity rush the first week of school – this has since been modified for a variety of reasons – some good, some not-so-good) when Dave walked up to me and said something like “hey, want a beer?” (this was probably one of the “good” reasons since I was 17.) This started a 20+ year friendship that includes starting a successful company together (Feld Technologies), marriages and divorces, moves (we both ended up in Boulder), an unsuccessful entrepreneurial adventure (Wideforce Systems), several salvage operations (planetU, Xaffire) and lots of time spent exploring and learning new things. Dave was always one of the most intellectually capable people in the room (a 4.9/5.0 in Course 6 at MIT means something – I think the B was in psychology) and – while the startup company thing suited him well, he was never in love with the thing he was working to create.
Several years ago, Dave started taking some Cognitive Science classes at CU Boulder and hooked up with Randall O’Reilly. I remember seeing him light up one of the first times we talked about the research he was exploring and thought to myself – “this is it – he’s found what he wants to work on.” Last summer when he was visiting me in Alaska we talked about this idea a lot and I continued to encourage him to just go for it.
He did. Dave and Randy have started a new software company called eCortex to commercialize the visual object recognition technology that Randy and his team have been working on at CU Boulder. The technology is essentially a neural network model of the human visual system, including numerous biologically realistic characteristics, which allows it to see things much like we see them. Applications include surveillance (security cameras as well as luggage scanning), satellite photo analysis, military target identification, online image or video search, optical character recognition, and manufacturing. In one test, this system was trained on a sampling of 100 different objects, and successfully recognized the objects 96% of the time, even when shifted in the image, scaled down to as small as one-tenth the size, and rotated within a small range.
Now – there have been many attempts to create object recognition systems. While I don’t understand any of the science that Dave and Randy are working on, I do understand that much of what exists is basic pattern recognition algorithms rather than the magic of neural network simulations. I sat in a conference room recently and watched as Randy walked me through some examples using PDP++ (a neural network simulation system written in C++) explaining how eCortex is approaching the problem differently.
A few weeks later I sat in the same conference room and listened as a visiting VC told me that he’d heard there are no real computer science people in Boulder. I choked down my chai and mentioned a number of examples, including these two dudes working on this neural network thingy.