When Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, introduced Saqib Shaikh on the BUILD stage in 2016, he was obviously moved by the engineer’s “passion and empathy”, who said Nadella: “Will change the world.”
This assessment was correct because Shaikh co-founded the see mobile app AIThis is a showcase for the power of AI being applied to the needs of the blind or visually impaired. Using a phone’s camera, the Seeing AI app can describe a physical scene, identify people and their behavior, read documents (including handwritten), read currency values and tell colors. The latest version uses haptic technology to help the user find the location of objects and people in an image. The app has been used 20 million times since it was launched almost three years ago and now works in eight languages.
It is exciting to announce that Shaikh will speak at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that explores how rapid advances in technology, many of which are AI-related, are impacting the development of accessibility and assistive technologies for the blind or partially sighted. The show which is a project for the Vista Center for the blind and visually impaired Silicon Valley, recently launched on ProWellTech. The virtual event will take place from December 2nd to 3rd and is free to the public. Pre-register here.
Shaikh lost his eyesight at the age of 7 and attended a school for blind students, where he was fascinated by computers that could “talk” to students. He then studied computer science at the UK University of Sussex. “One of the things I’d always dreamed of since college,” he says, “was something that could tell you at any moment who and what was going on around you.” That dream became his fate.
After joining Microsoft in 2006, Shaikh participated in Microsoft’s annual weeklong hackathons in 2014 and 2015 to come up with the idea of applying AI to help people who are blind or visually impaired. Not long after that, Seeing AI became an official project and Shaikh’s full-time job at Microsoft. The company’s Cognitive Services APIs were critical to its work He now leads a team of engineers who use emerging technologies to empower blind people.
“When it comes to AI,” says Shaikh, “I think disabled people are really good early adopters. We can refer to the history of blind people using audiobooks for decades and so on, to OCR text to speech, whatever is an early AI. Nowadays, this idea that a computer can look at an image and convert it to a sentence has many use cases, but perhaps the most compelling thing to do is describe that image of a blind person. For the blind, this is incredibly helpful. ”Below see a video that Microsoft released in 2016 about Shaikh and the Seeing AI project.
The Seeing AI project is an early example of a tool that leverages various AI technologies in a way that creates an almost “intelligent” experience. For example, when you see AI you not only read the text, but also learn how to move the phone so that the document is in the viewfinder. Not only does it tell you that there are people in front of you, it tells you about them, including who they are (if you’ve named them in the past) and their general appearance.
At Sight Tech Global, Shaikh will speak about the future of Seeing AI and his views on how accessibility will evolve in a world made more inclusive through cloud computing, low latency networks and increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms and datasets becomes.
To pre-register for a free ticket, please visit Sight Tech Global.
Please follow the event on Twitter @Globalsight.
Sponsors are welcome, and options are available from supporting branding to integrating content. Please send an email to sponser@sighttechglobal.com for more information.