I am motivated and passionate about building products which just work, are useful and bring delight to customers, however enabled by use and development of real hard technology (things which most experts would classify as "can't be done" but most people would simply label as "magic").

The inspiration for my (mis-)steps is most succinctly put in this famous third law and quote by Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

About

Navneet's cofounder & CEO of Matician, a startup building CV+ML+AI led truly autonomous robots that save people time & energy.

Prior to this, I was the cofounder of Flutter where we enabled hand gesture detection via built-in webcams in TVs, tablets and phones. Flutter app became number one app on the Mac App Store in 2012 in 72 countries and was picked by Apple in 2012 as one of the best app of the year. It was one of the first CA/AI based edge-device application and a rare computer-vision-based-consumer-software to have 4.8 stars (out of 5) rating. Flutter was acquired by Google in 2013 after Google quantitatively verified that Flutter algorithms beat the algorithms that Google had inside.

Inside Google, I was involved with various projects at Google AI and at Nest. At Nest, I led algorithms team for Nest Cams and launched many CV based features with Nest Cam Outdoor, IQs, and Hello doorbell before leaving to start Matician.

I am perhaps best known for "Histogram of Oriented Gradient" features (a joint work with Bill Triggs and published in CVPR 2005) as way to encode images and videos enabling machines to classify and locate objects in image. This paper improved the then state-of-art by 100-1000x and became the de-facto standard for almost a decade. It has 25K+ citations. The work was done at INRIA Grenoble as part of my PhD thesis "Finding People in Images and Video Sequences" (coadvised by Bill Triggs and Cordelia Schmid).

I grew up in Chandigarh, India, have lived in Grenoble, France, and am currently settled in San Francisco bay area since last 10+ years. In my spare time I love to hike, bike, travel, ski and woodworking. When I was young, I used to paint and sketch a lot (however that's part of past life now).

Publications

Google bots are awesome and they have compiled the complete list, accessible at Google Scholar page.

Email: contact [at] ndalal [dot] com