Timestamps
(02:14) Alberto briefly shared his upbringing and education at the Bayes Business School in London.
(04:01) Alberto shared key learnings from his first entrepreneurial stint at 19 by developing a 3D printing product for ed-tech.
(07:48) Alberto described his overall experience participating in Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program at the NASA Ames Research Park under a Google-funded scholarship in 2015.
(12:52) Alberto helped develop the Aipoly product to aid the blind and visually impaired.
(17:38) Alberto showed his enthusiasm for federated learning applications within mobile devices.
(19:53) Alberto talked about the dichotomy between capitalism and social good in entrepreneurship.
(22:29) Alberto shared the backstory behind the founding of V7 Labs.
(26:40) Alberto discussed the comparison between biological and artificial neural networks.
(28:02) Alberto emphasized the importance of having a good co-founder.
(30:27) Alberto dissected the notable features developed within V7’s Annotation capability.
(33:37) Alberto went over things to look for in a video labeling tool, citing his blog post.
(37:21) Alberto unpacked key principles behind V7’s robust Dataset Management tool.
(40:53) Alberto walked through the powerful capabilities of V7 Neurons that power its Model Automation tool.
(43:33) Alberto shared fundraising advice for founders seeking the right investors for their startups.
(46:07) Alberto shared valuable hiring and culture-setting lessons learned at V7.
(50:12) Alberto emphasized the importance of not losing sight of the ‘ideal customer’ for young founders in the AI space.
(53:01) Alberto shared the hurdles his team has to go through while finding new customers in new industries.
(55:10) Alberto walked through labeling challenges dealing with medical imaging datasets.
(57:35) Alberto discussed outreach initiatives that helped drive V7’s organic growth.
(59:49) Alberto mentioned the importance of collaboration between companies within the MLOps ecosystem.
(01:02:01) Alberto touched on the scientific hunger of Europe regarding the adoption of AI technologies.
(01:03:49) Alberto briefly mentioned what public recognition means to him in the pursuit of democratizing AI for the world.
(01:06:07) Closing segment.
Alberto’s Contact Info
V7’s Resources
Mentioned Content
Articles
“7 Things We Looked for in a Video Labeling Tool” (Aug 2020)
“The Biggest Mistake I’ve Ever Made: Losing Sight of the Ideal Customer” (March 2021)
Talks
“An AI Narrator for the Blind” (TEDx Geneva 2016)
“If The Blind Could See” (TEDx Melbourne 2018)
People
Geoff Hinton (for rethinking the ML field fundamentally)
Chelsea Finn (for her work on meta-learning)
Jeff Clune (for making agents that work at scale in the real world)
Book
“Start With Why” (by Simon Sinek)
Notes
V7 is hiring across all departments. Take a look at their careers page for the openings!
About the show
Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.
Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing khanhle.1013@gmail.com.
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Episode 80: Creating The Sense of Sight with Alberto Rizzoli