Towards a better, AI-assisted world

Supervaisor sets off towards the vision of saving lives and reducing injuries on our roads with the help of deep learning.

The great thing about being part of world changing companies is that you become convinced that it can be done again. With Skype we worked on making the world better by bringing people closer together virtually, with Teleport we worked on making the world better by bringing people closer together physically. And now, it’s time to take on another challenge to better the world — and this time it’s about saving lives.

On average around every 25 seconds someone dies in traffic and countless more suffer from injuries. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for children and young adults (5–29) and the fifth largest killer of humans in general. Road traffic crashes cost most countries about 3% of GDP and yet outside the marvellous (but slipping) effort of building autonomous vehicles, little innovation seems to be directed at the root causes of traffic accidents.

Simply put, the main cause of all this suffering are the limitations of our brains:

• our inability to force ourselves to focus on the task at hand for long periods of time, restrain from distractions and handle our emotions
• our inability to estimate our skills and abilities, to remember important safety precautions and operate machinery under the influence
• our inability to see ourselves as part of a larger system where our choices affect others and to consistently follow the rules that were designed to protect us.

It’s almost as if we need someone to constantly tap on our shoulders and remind us to be at our best behavior when we propel our 1–2 ton metal boxes around each other.

I am going to keep you in suspense by not telling you how exactly are we planning to tackle the issue. What I can tell you now is that it’s going to involve us (people who want our roads to be safer), computer vision (cameras), artificial intelligence (better than our brains in limited domains) and a sprinkle of contrarian thinking.

Surely these ingredients allow for an endless mix of ways to address the problem and to be fully honest — we’re still figuring out which exact recipe will work the best, but with our early ideas we’ve already gotten an amazing group of supporters excited and rooting for our mission.

I would like to announce that we have raised an early round of €1.2M from Taavet Hinrikus, Jaan Tallinn, Andy Chung, Philipp Moehring, Shin Iwata, Sten Tamkivi, United Angels, Taavi Kotka and more awesome supporters from around the world.

We are truly honored to receive such strong support in our early days and with the capital investment can now focus fully on making an impact.

And since we’re on the subject of making an impact — who wants to come save lives with us? We’re looking for folks with backgrounds in

• deep learning
• mobile application development
• BE & FE engineering

Sign up for updates for when we’re ready to share more, follow us on social and reach out to us at jobs@supervaisor.com or ping me directly for opportunities in our early team.

Silver Keskküla
Founder & CEO
Supervaisor