Mindtech - innovative AI and visual processing solutions

by Startacus Admin

The lowdown on Mindtech, the Sheffield-based startup that's on a mission to enable complete solutions for anyone who needs intelligent visual processing.

In November 2020, the number of CCTV cameras in the UK reached 5.2 million. This is the subject of many a hot debate about privacy, and whether it is being breached and laws broken. It raises the question of what databases our faces are scanned into and saved on, and for what uses. 

Perhaps the majority of people don’t think much about it and don’t really care, but wouldn’t it be nice to know that there are cameras watching and keeping an eye on things, but your privacy isn’t in question? What if an AI could be trained to understand everything it was seeing and alert the right people at the right time?

UK artificial intelligence startup Mindtech is creating such a system. They say that their end-to-end synthetic data-creation platform can use visual simulations of all kinds of situations and scenarios in all kinds of locations, running through millions of possibilities, and then use this data to train AI, which watches everything the same as CCTV would have, except never losing focus and doing a crossword instead. 

It can detect abnormalities in behaviour inside shops or on the street or around train lines, etc., and take appropriate action, whether this is alerting security to a crime, staff to a lost child, self-driving cars to dangers on the road, or anything else AI will become used for in the near future. This is all thanks to Mindtech’s Chameleon platform’s ability to train anyone else’s AI for whatever needs that AI’s organisation has, which can free up a lot of time machine learning teams otherwise spend with training data, which Mindtech says is up to 80%, allowing them to concentrate on other innovations. 

As well as this, because Chameleon runs through all those millions of simulations and learns about human behavior, passing this learning on to other AI systems, the bias and discrimination - unconscious or otherwise - that can exist in human operators or even in AIs directly trained by humans with those failings is removed from the equation.

In July, Mindtech announced that it had raised $3.25 million in an early-stage funding round led by NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance, with Deeptech Labs and In-Q-Tel also participating. This funding will accelerate the startup’s growth. So the next time you walk past a CCTV camera, it might be an AI looking back at you.

 

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Published on: 18th August 2021