How AI Camera Systems are Revolutionizing Public Safety: Interview with Chris Piche, Founder and CEO of Smarter AI
Vehicle to Everything (V2X) is a new generation of information and communication technologies that connects vehicles to traffic infrastructure such as roads, intersections, pedestrians, and other vehicles.
Did you know that car accidents are the leading cause of death in the U.S., resulting in more than 42,000 people losing their lives each year? V2X will enable fully autonomous driving to eliminate or reduce traffic collisions, congestion, and fatalities.
The following interview with Chris Piche, Founder of Smarter AI, discusses the role of AI cameras and computer vision in the future of V2X, autonomous driving, and public safety. Smarter AI is an enablement software platform for AI cameras that see, listen, and understand. Smarter AI delivers vehicle camera and computer vision solutions for transportation safety.
Julian Lee: Everybody, I’ve got Chris Piche. He’s the CEO and Founder of a company called “Smarter AI”. Guess what they do, Smarter AI, and dashcams and a whole bunch of stuff. We’ll dig into this. Chris, welcome. How are you doing?
Chris Piche: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Julian. Julian Lee: Alright, so tell me a bit about what do you guys do?
Chris Piche: Smarter AI is a software platform for AI cameras. In the same way that Android and iOS are software platforms for smartphones, Smarter AI is a software platform for AI cameras.
Julian Lee: So what does it do? What does a smarter AI camera does it mean? I’m assuming it makes it smarter, but it detects things, it tracks things, what does it do?
Chris Piche: Exactly, it makes an AI camera smarter. In the same way that we can download different mobile apps on our smartphones, and those mobile apps come from Apple, Google, and third party developers, and some of us can even develop our own mobile apps …
… a smarter AI camera is the same idea. We can download different AI models – technically, we call them neural network models, but that’s just a fancy way of saying AI models. And an AI model is a piece of software that’s trained to detect something. There are AI models to detect cars, to detect people, or to detect almost any object or action you can think of. So with a Smarter AI camera, each customer can download AI models to solve their business problems. Do they want to detect or count cars? Do they want to detect or count people? What exactly do they want to do with the camera? In the same way that you and I and everybody else, we can choose different mobile apps for our smartphones for different uses.
Julian Lee: Interesting. So I know it works with the dashcams. And that’s where a lot of cameras are these days with fleet management and all that stuff. So I’m assuming you’re going to make sure that the drivers don’t steal the stuff for drive too crazy, or whatever, what are some of the things that your dash cam does, for let’s say, fleets and stuff like that?
Chris Piche: So initially in the short term, the biggest opportunity for our dashcams is all about driver and driving safety. Most of us at some time or another have been guilty of driving, and the phone beeps and we pick up the phone to read the message. This is exactly the kind of unsafe driving that our dashcams can be programmed to detect. And then to notify the driver that, maybe it’s a good idea to put the phone down while they’re driving.
So in the short term, it’s all about driver and driving safety. In the longer term it’s about smart cities. Think ahead in a couple of years, once we have enough of these Smarter AI cameras on the road, we’ll be able to help cities with planning transportation systems to minimize congestion and accidents, we’ll be able to help with road maintenance, identifying cracks in roads that can be repaired before they become potholes.
So, in the short term, it’s about safer driving and in the longer term, it’s about smarter cities.
Julian Lee: Oh, I see. I mean like, Waves, tells you where the congestion is, move you there, move you left, movie you right, that type of stuff. I mean, identifying where the bottlenecks are.
Chris Piche: Exactly. Waves does a great job of telling you about traffic congestion. Smarter AI cameras – because we’ve got video, we’ve got computer vision, now we can take that one step further. We can tell you about pedestrian traffic at such and such an intersection, or that there’s a lot of bicycle traffic on a specific street. And with this kind of information, cities can do a better job of planning, crosswalks, overpasses, bicycle lanes for greener, more efficient transportation that we all aspire to.
Julian Lee: Makes a lot of sense. And the thing is they’re getting now a lot of this stuff, and it’d be great to actually have some data behind it. So you’ve got the short term goals which is helping people, don’t pick up that phone while they drive, I’m assuming it will enforce certain policies. So whatever the driver is supposed to do, it monitors that. And I don’t know what else you can do, but I’m assuming you can probably customize it for whatever these folks want. What are some of the other uses cases that is being used for now?
Chris Piche: Well, there are a lot of use cases for driver and driving safety. Think about both what’s happening inside a vehicle cabin, and what’s happening outside, surrounding a vehicle. Inside the cabin, texting and driving is obviously a huge problem. And various other forms of either distracted or complacent driving. Surrounding a vehicle, tailgating is another huge cause of traffic collisions.
Julian Lee: I don’t do it all.
Chris Piche: I don’t either, definitely not the two of us. But if we did from time to time, slip up, and we had one of our Smarter AI cameras, we could get a polite notification letting us know, that it might be a good idea to back off the car in front of us a little bit. Or lane drift – drifting out of your lane, rolling stops – not coming to a complete stop when you should.
Julian Lee: I can see that camera buzzing all the time and when I drive. But it’s interesting because it’s also from things like Uber driving and also filming outside if you get into an accident. Like, what happened for real, there’s all these other things as well that maybe it can actually help in. I mean, everybody’s got a camera, why not have it attached to our automobiles, and our bicycles and our motorcycles and so on. So you’ve got your dream of actually leveraging the multiple cameras everywhere to sort of map out what’s happening in a city to sort of take that data, and help people figure out what they need and what they don’t need?
Chris Piche: In the short term, it’s specifically about individual driver and driving safety. In the longer term, it’s about how can we operate more safely? And how can we plan our cities in a way to improve transportation, including safety, congestion, road maintenance, and more.
Julian Lee: I get it. So does it have to have your camera, or can the software be uploaded any camera on the dash cam? How does it work?
Chris Piche: You can think of Smarter AI as a platform for cameras as Android is to phones. In the same way that if I want Google’s smartphone I can buy a Pixel, which is Google’s top of the line smartphone. we’ve got our Smarter AI cameras, our top of the line AI cameras. And if a third-party wants to develop a smartphones, they can they can license the Android software. Third parties can develop AI cameras with Smarter AI software inside. So we know we have both options: we can provide a complete hardware and software solution, or we can support those who want to develop their own camera hardware.
Julian Lee: Interesting stuff. Looks like, it’s early days but it’s like it’s an interesting opportunity. And for folks who want to learn more, what’s the website address?
Chris Piche: https://smarterai.camera.
Julian Lee: There you go. We’ll check it all out. I mean, there’s so many things happening in this digital transformation of our planet. Smart Cities definitely the top of the food chain of where we’ve headed. And maybe this is some interesting user cases you can have today to sell, make some money on it as an MSP community could. And maybe there’s a long term plan you can help to fix things in our cities. Chris, it’s been a pleasure, keep us posted or things are going anything else you want to say to the channel community before we park?
Chris Piche: Thanks very much for having me, Julian. I’ll love the opportunity to come back in a few months and tell you about the progress we’ve made. The channel is crucial to our success. Smarter AI is looking for channel partners to deliver our camera solutions to vehicle fleets, both domestically and around the world. For any channel partners watching who might be interested, our website is https://smarterai.camera.
Julian Lee: That stuff well. You heard it MSPs out there if you’re dealing in the fleet world, or Smart City world, hit him up and see what they’re doing. Chris, thank you. Cheers.
Chris Piche: Good bye.
About Chris Piche:
Chris Piche is a computer scientist and technology entrepreneur. Born and raised in Canada, he is an expert in distributed networking, scalable video, and computer vision technologies.
Chris has created products and technologies including AT&T TV, BlackBerry Video, Polycom Video, and STUN/TURN/ICE. He has also been awarded Best of Internet World, Canada’s Top Young Leader, and Top 40 under 40.
Chris is now the Founder of Smarter AI, an enablement software platform for AI cameras that see, listen, and understand.
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