Meet LDV Capital’s Expert In Residence, Computer Vision Leader Serge Belongie

LDV Vision Summit 2016. We are a family affair! Serge and August Belongie thanking the audience for a fantastic, inspirational gathering. ©Robert Wright

We are honored to announce that computer vision and machine learning expert Serge Belongie has joined LDV Capital’s team as our first Expert in Residence [ER]. Serge is a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech and a technical leader in our field of visual technologies. He has co-founded several computer vision startups that have been acquired, and he thrives on empowering others to succeed.  

“I am excited to deepen my collaboration with Evan and LDV Capital in our mutual pursuit of empowering students, PhDs, and our ecosystem to leverage deep technical skills to solve problems and build valuable businesses that benefit society,” says Serge.

I met Serge in March 2013, and I have been inspired by his insights, expertise, passion, and modest genius since the day we met. We share a passion and curiosity for how visual technologies will empower businesses and humanity. His unique combination of industry expertise, professorial guidance, enthusiasm to empower students to build businesses, and technical advisory guidance is an extremely unique combination. We have been working closely together on our LDV Vision Summit since 2014, and we are honored to collaborate more deeply going forward.

We joined forces with others to create the successful annual LDV Vision Summit, which started as a one-day event in June 2014. It has since evolved into a two-day event with over 500 attendees, 80 speakers, 40 sessions, and 2 competitions [Startup Competition & Computer Vision Challenges]. Our summit is unique in that it gathers visionaries and cutting-edge technologies across our visual technology ecosystem, including startups, investors, CV/ML/AI researchers/professors, technology/media executives, and creators, in one place to inspire, raise capital, recruit talent, and facilitate commercial deals.

“Frequently I cross paths with talented students, researchers, and PhDs who want to explore commercialization but are overwhelmed by the options. LDV Capital, Cornell Tech, and I are always looking for ways to further empower technological advancements and our ecosystem,” says Serge.

Serge is also a co-founder of several companies, including Digital Persona (which merged with CrossMatch 2014), CarCode (which was acquired by Transport Data Systems), Anchovi Labs (which was acquired by Dropbox in 2012), and Orpix. He also serves as technical advisor to Osmo and other companies.

LDV Community Dinner, October 2014. Serge introducing himself and, as always, keeping it lively. ©Robert Wrigh

LDV Vision Summit 2016, Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge Winner: Grokstyle, co-founded by Cornell researchers Sean Bell and Kavita Bala. Serge congratulating CEO Sean Bell. ©Robert Wright 

“As Computer Vision vision finds more success in practical domains, my research interests have shifted from the fundamentals of object recognition to the challenges of human-in-the-loop computing. I find this area fascinating since it involves humans and machines working together to solve problems that neither can solve in isolation.”

Serge is also pushing the envelope with regard to computer vision and machine learning research across multiple projects, such as:

Residual Networks Behave Like Ensembles of Relatively Shallow Networks with Andreas Veit and Michael Wilber.

Context Matters: Refining Object Detection in Video with Recurrent Neural Networks with Subarna Tripathi, Zachary Lipton, and Truong Nguyen.

Visipedia: Fine Grained Visual Categorization with Humans in the Loop, with Pietro Perona

Learning to Match Aerial Images with Deep Attentive Architectures with James Hays and Tsung-Yi Lin

Boosted Convolutional Neural Networks with Mohammad Moghimi, Mohammad Saberian, Jian Yang, Li-Jia Li, and Nuno Vasconcelos

View more research from Serge.

LDV Capital’s Experts in Residence work part time on helping us track interesting companies, collaborating on due diligence, providing valuable advice to portfolio companies, analyzing trends with our team, and continuing to collaborate closely on our annual LDV Vision Summit. We look forward to adding more experts to our LDV Capital team to continue empowering people, universities, and our ecosystem to support technical people in their pursuit to commercialize deep tech research. Many of LDV Capital’s portfolio companies leverage deep tech research, and they are always recruiting smart people.

LDV Vision Summit 2014.  How will image recognition disrupt businesses and empower humanity? How can we inspire more researchers to bring their visions to market? Moderator: Evan Nisselson Panelists: Serge Belongie, Professor, Cornell NYC Tech, Computer Vision Expert; Gary Bradski, Magic Leap, VP Computer Vision & Machine Learning; and Moshe Bercovich, Shutterfly, GM Israel. ©Dan Taylor

Serge Belongie received a B.S. (with honors) in electrical engineering  from Caltech in 1995 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from Berkeley in 2000. While at Berkeley, his research was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. From 2001 to 2013, he was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, San Diego. He is currently a professor at Cornell Tech and in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, crowdsourcing and human-in-the-loop computing. He is also a co-founder of several companies, including Digital Persona, Anchovi Labs, and Orpix. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review “Innovators Under 35” Award, and the Helmholtz Prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision.