A mid-career opportunity to turn imagination into reality
In 2013, Anbu seized the opportunity to join Intel. As a college student, he was completely in awe of the Intel’s Pentium® processors and the power of innovation. “The ‘magic’ that goes into creating such products of sheer brilliance, far ahead of others, is just amazing.” Taking inspiration from his role model, he realized it was a chance to turn his vision about the future into reality.
Making India’s roads safer with AI technology
As a principal engineer at Intel, Anbu works on innovations in computer vision and machine learning. One of the most fulfilling aspects of his Intel career is the ability to make a real-world impact through his work, as he did recently with a project on creating the world’s first dataset on unstructured driving conditions.
India, unfortunately, leads in the global statistics of road accidents with 17 deaths per hour. This was a problem of national importance and needed an approach in multiples directions.
In late 2017, Anbu’s group was presented with a project opportunity to collaborate with a leading Indian academic institute in computer vision and AI to create an asset of wider use for the benefit of the technical community and our entire society.
“One approach to the problem was to enable research on developing solutions for Indian road analysis – for problems like object detection, drivable area identification, etc. Most of the AI and computer vision algorithms being developed for this are primarily built for Western countries and there was no benchmark to test them on the unstructured driving conditions found in India. “
“I immediately took on the project. This collaborative project led to the release of a new dataset on Indian driving conditions and was extremely well received in the global research community. Over 1000 researchers across the world have downloaded this dataset, and it has been used for research challenges on road scene analysis in international technical events. Moreover, the dataset was also used as a resource in the 2018 Global Mobility Hackathon, which was organized by India’s government to develop innovative solutions. This would help in building a future that is safe for the people on the roads and the nation. I am extremely happy to have been involved in this project with the potential for large societal impact.”
Anbu has no doubt that the fast pace of AI and ML technology development will usher in a world where people can expect all devices around them to be smart – and that Intel has a huge role to play in making that happen. “I imagine a future where every device is a data processor – and has an Intel product inside.” Anbu says that Intel continues to be a strong leader in the technical community and society – much like his role model.
Unlimited opportunities to innovate, make a difference, and create a better future makes Anbu deeply satisfied with his mid-career change.