Archive for Artificial Intelligence

Ekaterina Demenkova

Ekaterina Demenkova recently made it on the Twenty Under Twenty list, where she pitched her health tracking app, PODIL. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, and is the Founder and CEO of PODIL. This type of position comes with great responsibility, but Ekaterina was passionate about her innovative cause and became an established young entrepreneur that helps many people with her creation.

PODIL promotes wellness, and allows its users to meet their health and wellness goals through an AI. The AI assistant gives the user a list of steps specifically curated for them that helps make someone’s health goals attainable. It utilizes a communal platform where people can share their accomplishments with their friends and family, and compete in challenges together.

Ekaterina’s overall goal was to make health information and personal health tips more accessible, and her app does just that. Her mission is to help people develop healthy habits, and grow easily, and PODIL uses technology to her advantage in doing so.

She is a perfect example of an innovative, young entrepreneur, especially considered what she has accomplished at such a young age. She revolutionized a new way to receive accurate, efficient, and reliable health information and advice so that people can make positive and healthy changes in their lives.

Upstart – You’re More Than Your Credit Score

According to a 2019 survey by Bankrate, 58% of millennials were denied at least one type of financial product due to their credit score.  A lot of young Americans are being denied the financial support they need because of a bad credit score.  While a credit score may be important, they are often not a fair and accurate indicator of an individual’s ability to pay back credit.  Previously, one’s credit score is a make or break in the world of loans.  28-year-old entrepreneur Paul Gu is trying to change that with his company, Upstart.

Upstart is an online lender that aims to help people erase credit card debt.  However, they do more than a traditional lending firm.  Upstarts underwrites loans with quite unconventional data.  For example, while a traditional lender may heavily weight credit score and income, Upstart factors data such as SAT scores, college majors, and college grades into the underwriting process.  With this model, Upstart approves 27% more applicants than a traditional model, according to a CFPB study.  Upstart analyzes this data using machine-learning.  There has been a rise of the use of artificial intelligence by financial institutions, as seen in online approvals, robo-advisors, and technologies such as Ocrolus.  Upstart’s loans also feature next-day funding and no prepayment penalty.

Paul Gu’s untraditional new method may significantly change the way loans are written in the future.  If people flock to a more lenient approval system, other lenders may have to lower their approval thresholds by lowering standards or factoring in other customer data, like Upstart.  Paul Gu’s forward-thinking actions have created an interesting and potentially revolutionary new method for approaching consumer loans.  With his creation, many more honest people with bad credit scores will be able to pay off their credit card debt.  Time will tell if his method will stick and other lenders will follow suit.  Regardless, it will be interesting to see what Gu does next.

 

Luminar – See the World Differently

 

Imagine being 16 and studying at the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California, Irvine. Now imagine starting a business that has the potential to change how the transportation industry works forever. Both these events happened to Austin Russell in the same year. Austin Russell, now 22, is the founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, a company that blew the doors off the automotive and autonomy industries. Luminar has developed a laser sensor technology that, compared to current-day LiDAR sensors, has 10x the range and 50x the resolution. These improvements are brought on by the increased rate at which the lasers of the Luminar sensor seek and receive data about their environment.

To this point, Luminar has raised more than $36 million and employs over 250 people. Russell says that he wants this product to have a real impact on the world, not just be some app someone downloads onto their phone. Russell says that this impact he is aiming for is to innovate on how people move, and to help eliminate one of the leading causes of death in the world.

Tech for First-Responders

Young entrepreneurs are always impressive, but Mihir Garimella is one that really strikes me. He made in on an 18 under 18 list for inspiring entrepreneurs and businesses owns. Mihir is currently a sophomore at Stanford has a passion for working with robotics. His mission is to create real impact. He has definitely accomplished this through his invention of the Firefly.

At the age of 17 Mihir designed The Firefly, a modified drone which is specifically designed for  first-responders. It allows them to explore situations and disasters that could be dangerous and helps to find trapped survivors.

The Firefly is only one of Mihir’s creations. He has started work on projects that included self driving cars, adding scent to the movie theater experience, image processing that will help doctors with diagnosing patients, an app called Series which helps solve complex calculus problems using handwriting recognition and Citelt, a tool for writing correct bibliographies.

Image result for firefly drone mihir

Mihir is a strong example of the left and right brain working cohesively and productively to create new and amazing things. I am excited to see the impact that will come from his hard work and passion.

Tetra – Calls Transcribed

Jon Goldsmith and Nikolas Liolio of Tetra

 

It all started as a hobby for Phillips Exeter Academy students Jon Goldsmith and Nikolas Liolio. Putting together simple machine-learning models, expanding on them, advancing them with higher-level algorithms. It was good, educating fun for the both of them as they approached their high school graduation and would be heading off to college, but then another opportunity arose. Jon and Nik saw the opportunity to take one of their side projects and incubate it into a major, ground-breaking idea. They were working on various programs that took machine-learning and implemented it into voice recognition and translation, something that has been rising in the tech world for the past few years. However, their idea was a little different than that of the self-translating earbuds or just simple speech-to-text.

They wanted to implement artificial intelligence inside a voice-translation phone app and have the app take down notes specific to each person for later review. Thus, Ask Tetra was born. Ask Tetra, mostly referred to as just Tetra, implements a personal, as well as business, phone app that takes a recording throughout any call and transcribes what was said by each party of the call. Though the base of this idea had been flushed out across many different platforms over the past couple years, Tetra did something very unique to the whole conference call environment. Tetra actively used its AI capabilities to scrub through the transcripts to suggest highlights throughout the call, to ensure all the important talking points can be remembered and referenced later on. In this way, Tetra allows for conference calls to not have to be a constant overlapping of people talking, and people missing out on key information that then either needs to be repeated constantly, or simply forgotten all together.

Jon and Nik should be viewed as models of the new-age entrepreneur. They are young, open-minded individuals who took one of their shared passions, gave it some time to develop, and then took a leap into the industry of consumer tech with their new, ground-breaking idea. Jon and Nik have been able to amass quite a number of backers and investors to keep their idea growing and their company expanding. What once started off as a two man project has now grown to roughly a thirty man operation worth over $1 million , and is working harder now than ever to implement their innovative tech with the web communication giants of today’s world.