Q&A Session with Neurodata Lab Founder George Pliev
So far, our Meduim blog covered stories on our exciting research findings, fun experiments, or new products. We decided it’s time to introduce our Founding Partner George Pliev — a person whose ideas and committment brought Neurodata Lab to where it is now. We’ve run a short Q&A session with our founder to discuss the foundation of our startup, his views on the future of AI, and whether a successful company can be built outside of Silicon Valley.
Q: When journalists ask startup founders about how they came up with the idea of their startups, many say they tried to create something they couldn’t find as consumers. Or that they wanted to refine a process or service. Was your journey into startup world anything like this?
My journey was different. Having built a successful career in construction industry, I started thinking about how the world economy — my industry included — will change in the future. I realized that while our civilization relied on land or natural resources in the past, people will be the driving force of the future. Every second we live, we generate exponentially growing data. We work, rest, communicate, create, destroy, consume, trade, make decisions, and pick options. All of this produces information on us, our routines and habits, but this information is useless in itself. It gets valuable once it’s structured and transformed into knowledge that can be later capitalized on.
Having realized this, I went on thinking about how we all are going to manage this data. I reckoned that the next technological wave will be focused on structuring the chaos of this data and drawing knowledge from it. Just like the industrial society capitalized on energy drawn from hydrocarbons processing, information/post-industrial society will capitalize on knowledge drawn from data analysis. I am sure such knowledge may bring us new inventions, sustainable economic growth, and a much better quality of life worldwide. With these thoughts, I founded Neurodata Lab.
Q: Most startup founders start their companies in Silicon Valley or move there to grow. Why didn’t you?
I knew that coming to Silicon Valley was no longer a requirement for building a successful company. I saw that high-potential startups were born from three things: a great idea, a devoted team, and access to venture capital. Despite common belief, venture funding is not limited to California. You can find venture capitalists in many places such as Austin or Denver or Seattle. Hence for me, the real challenge was to come up with a good product idea and find talented people who would want to bring it to life.
Q: How did you translate your vision of the future into tangible products?
When I started thinking about how human data was analyzed and applied, I felt there was a niche that few people thought of: emotions and physiology. For a long time, economists and businesses assumed that customers were moved by rational motives while every salesperson or a shop assistant could tell you how much a decision to buy something depends on a customer’s mood or thirst for impressions. Yet only recently — thanks to futurologists such as Richard Yonck — this idea got embraced by a wide range of corporations that included customer experience in their strategies. However, very few of them actually considered emotion analytics an effective technological tool, and the market of emotion analytics was relatively small. I saw an opportunity and started building AI-based business-oriented products that analyze emotional and physiological data. After several years of working on a reliable scientific base and proprietary technological stack, we created products for adtech/martech industry, smart working, and remote monitoring. We built AdPower — a tool that predicts a video ad’s recall and retention rates before brands run it. We created The Suite — an analytics platform that analyzes data on team performance and uses AI to draw up team productivity charts. We also launched VVS — an assistive tool for industrial safety and corporate security professionals that could be used for contactless screenings and as a substitute for traditional polygraph testing as well. All our products are aimed at enterprises and B2B segment in general.
Q: Why base your products on AI?
AI is the only instrument capable of analyzing the volumes of data we have already generated and keep creating. I believe AI will become increasingly more important as an mediator and data handler that transforms raw human data into applicable knowledge. AI has a lot of untapped potential we don’t even realize yet.
Q: Is there a limit to where we can use AI?
I think AI could potentially solve an unlimited number of tasks, and its scope of application will become broader as AI and machine learning approaches evolve. But one thing we must keep in mind is that humans, not algorithms, should be making final decisions about anything that could affect real human lives, so that’s where we should draw a line.
Q: Will emotion recognition and physiological signal processing become more important in the future?
Definitely so. The world is getting increasingly more complex, automated, and remote. Our contactless emotion recognition and physiological signal processing tools will help businesses thrive in this environment. For instance, a product or service will get much more appealing if business will show empathy and understanding of a customer’s mood, emotions, and physiological state. Secondly, stress or conflicts induced by remote work — which soon will become the new norm — will be mitigated if all remote team members will be in tune with each other’s moods and emotions and know when they are in their productive phases. Thirdly, our tools will be of use for remote medical diagnostics, and we are now working on adding more technologies to our stack.
By George Pliev, Managing Partner at Neurodata Lab; Francesca Del Giudice, PR Manager at Neurodata Lab; Sergey Vaganov, SMM&Digital Manager at Neurodata Lab
