When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Saqib Shaikh on stage at BUILD in 2016, he was obviously moved by the engineer\u2019s \u201cpassion and empathy,\u201d which Nadella said, \u201cis going to change the world.\u201d
\nThat assessment was on the mark because Shaikh went on to co-found the mobile app Seeing AI, which is a showcase for the power of AI applied to the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired. Using the camera on a phone, the Seeing AI app can describe a physical scene, identify persons and their demeanor, read documents (including handwritten ones), read currency values and tell colors. The latest version uses haptic technology to help the user discover the position of objects and people in an image. The app has been used 20 million times since launch nearly three years ago, and today it works in eight languages.
\nIt\u2019s exciting to announce that Shaikh will be speaking at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that addresses how rapid advances in technology, many of them AI-related, will influence the development of accessibility and assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The show, which is a project for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired Silicon Valley, launched recently on TechCrunch. The virtual event is Dec. 2-3 and free to the public. Pre-register here.\u00a0
\nShaikh lost his vision at the age of 7, and attended a school for blind students, where he was intrigued by computers that could \u201ctalk\u201d to students. He went on to study computer science at the U.K.\u2019s University of Sussex. \u201cOne of the things I had always dreamt of since university,\u201d he says, \u201cwas something that could tell you at any moment who and what\u2019s going on around you.\u201d\u00a0 That dream turned into his destiny.
\nAfter he joined Microsoft in 2006, Shaikh participated in Microsoft\u2019s annual, week-long hackathons in 2014 and 2015 to develop the idea of applying AI in ways that could help people who are blind or visually impaired. Not long after, Seeing AI became an official project and Shaikh\u2019s full-time job at Microsoft. The company\u2019s Cognitive Services APIs have been critical to his work, and he now leads a team of engineers who are leveraging emerging technology to empower people who are blind.
\n\u201cWhen it comes to AI,\u201d says Shaikh, \u201cI consider disabled people to be really good early adopters. We can point to history where\u00a0 blind people have been using talking books for decades and so on, all the way through to OCR text-to-speech, which is early AI. Today, this idea that a computer can look at an image and turn it into a sentence has many use-cases but probably the most compelling is to describe that image to a blind person. For blind people this is incredibly empowering.\u201d Below is a video Microsoft released in 2016 about Shaikh and the Seeing AI project.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Seeing AI project is an early example of a tool that taps various AI technologies in ways that produce an almost \u201cintelligent\u201d experience. Seeing AI doesn\u2019t just read the text, for example, it also tells the user how to move the phone so the document is in the viewfinder. It doesn\u2019t just tell you there are people in front of you, it tells you something about them, including who they are (if you have named them in the past) and their general appearance.
\nAt Sight Tech Global, Shaikh will speak about the future of Seeing AI and his views on how accessibility will unfold in a world more richly enabled by cloud compute, low latency networks and ever more sophisticated AI algorithms and data sets.\u00a0
\nTo pre-register for a free pass, please visit Sight Tech Global.
\nPlease follow the event on Twitter @Globalsight.
\nSponsors are welcome, and there are opportunities available ranging from branding support to content integration. Please email sponsor@sighttechglobal.com\u00a0for more information.<\/p>\n