Explainable-AI (Artificial Intelligence - XAI) Image Recognition Startup Won US Air Force Space Challenge Competition, as a Finalist

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Oct 05, 2020, 13:12 ET

POTOMAC, Md., Oct. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC), a software startup, has won the prestigious "Engage-Space Challenge" competition by the US Air Force (managed by AFWERX, for the space industry), as one of the 26 finalists, out of the original 800 teams (i.e., among about the top 4%). The teams included multi-billion dollar companies, startups, research labs, and universities across the globe. ZAC is the first to demonstrate Cognition-based Explainable-AI (XAI), where various attributes and details of 3D (three dimensional) objects can be recognized from any view or angle. "With our superior algorithms, complex 3D objects can be recognized from any direction, using only a small number of training samples," said Dr. Saied Tadayon, CTO of ZAC. "You cannot do this with the other techniques, such as Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), even with an extremely large number of training samples. That's basically hitting the limitations of CNNs, which others are using now," continued Dr. Bijan Tadayon, CEO of ZAC. "For complex tasks, such as detailed 3D image recognition, you need ZAC Cognitive algorithms. ZAC also requires less CPU/ GPU and electrical power to run, which is great for mobile or edge computing," emphasized Dr. Saied Tadayon.

ZAC won the US Air Force Engage-Space Challenge, as a finalist, based on its Explainable-AI (XAI) technologies, which enable wide variety of applications.

This technology enables image search in many applications, such as e-commerce, ad network, autonomous vehicles, medical imaging, satellite/ aerial imaging, smart homes/ appliances, smart cities, biometrics, face recognition, video, surveillance, and security.

ZAC intellectual property portfolio comprises over 450 inventions, including 11 issued US patents.

ZAC has an impressive team of scientists and developers. The development is headed by Saied Tadayon, a scientist and veteran software developer, who got his PhD from Cornell at age 23. ZAC world-renowned advisors include Prof. David Lee (Nobel Laureate in Physics), Prof. Mory Gharib (Vice Provost of Research for Caltech), Prof. Robert Buhrman (former Sr. Vice Provost of Research for Cornell), and Prof. Mo Jamshidi (UTSA, Founding Dir. of NASA Center for Autonomous Control, and a member of US Army Science Board). The late Prof. Lotfi Zadeh of UC Berkeley ("Father of Fuzzy Logic", co-inventor of Z-Transform, and an AI Hall-of-Fame inductee) is also one of ZAC inventors.

For those interested, a demo may be arranged by appointment.