Tell me what you see: Aipoly Vision

Image recognition has been, and still is, one of the holy grail for computer scientists that are struggling to find a way for a computer to do what seems so easy and natural to us.
There have been enormous progress in this area although to the lay person they may seem quite un-impressive! It is so easy to spot a chair in a living room, what’s the big deal? And of course, once you realise that the image recognition program failed to detect the scarf on the chair or mistook it for a magazine…. you are even less un-impressed!
To those in the loop, however, the progress has been amazing, and discovering, as I did today, that we can have a quite good image recognition program on our smart phone is sort of spectacular.
Go to the Apple Apps Store and download Aipoly Vision. Then look at an object through your smart phone camera and the app will voice the name of the object, car, chair, flower, and write it on the screen.
The app will increase its capability to recognise objects and it will do that through crowdsourcing effort. When the app does not recognise an object, or makes a mistake, the user can provide the right solution. This is shared through the web and all apps will increase their knowledge.
For me this app is a nice gadget reminding me of the progress made in image recongnition but for a visual impaired person this app can be really useful!

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.