I believe that an important part of the AI revolution involves:
1) Turning our progress into positive impact in the world,
2) Widening participation so that we all create the future together,
3) Making our technology more robust by diversifying the data and tasks we use,
so that computer vision works for everyone and everywhere.
Our goal in this workshop is to widen the scope of computer vision technology by investigating novel tasks, data and problems in the developing world.
We believe this will bring a positive impact in the world, but also will reveal biases and failures of our own computer vision technology as we expand the part of the visual world we're looking at.
More information to come here. Contact us to get involved.
In the summer of 2015 I organized and taught a workshop in computer vision and robotics for advanced teenagers in the island of Camiguin (Philippines).
Our goal was to empower students with basic knowledge of vision and robotics, with the hope that they use it to improve their own environment. In this spirit, we did projects on species recognition, garbage collection and machine translation from English to Bisaya. See more on this video.
During the summer of 2009 I was lucky to intern at the Voice Over team at Apple, which makes their technology accessible for people with disabilities. Back at UMass and inspired by this experience, we made this app for recognition of American notes.