AnyVision Changes Name to Oosto, Announces Partnership With Carnegie Mellon University
With the rebrand, Oosto says it’s looking beyond the lens of security to include ways it can positively impact an organization’s safety, productivity and customer experience.
NEW YORK — Artificial intelligence (AI)-based facial recognition startup AnyVision announces that the company will change its name to Oosto.
The new name is said to reflect the company’s evolution and vision for the future which is shaped, in part, by a new collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) CyLab Biometric Research Center. The CMU partnership will focus on early-stage research in object, body and behavior recognition.
“Historically, the company has focused on security-related use cases for our watchlist alerting and touchless access control solutions. With the launch of Oosto, we’re looking beyond the lens of security to include ways our solutions can positively impact an organization’s safety, productivity and customer experience,” says Oosto CEO Avi Golan.
AnyVision pioneered Vision AI to automate watchlist alerting, identifying security risks as well as valuable customers in real-time to personalize customer experiences and enhance physical security, according to the company.
The rebranded Oosto is said to leverage the power of Vision AI to enhance the safety of customers, guests and employees. Solutions include touchless access control, video analytics and new flavors of video-based recognition (object, body and behavioral recognition), which deliver the insights and alerts to protect these stakeholders from bad actors and security threats.
The company’s research partnership with CMU’s CyLab Biometric Research Center will focus on advanced object classification and behavior recognition algorithms for commercial use cases. Oosto says this collaboration will help it address a broad range of safety-related use cases, including object detection (e.g., weapons on school grounds) and behavioral analysis (e.g., when someone falls down).
As part of the partnership, Marios Savvides, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and founder and director of the Biometrics Center at CMU, will join Oosto as the chief AI scientist to expand Oosto’s AI team led by CTO Dieter Joecker.
“We were impressed by Oosto’s commitment to the fair and ethical use of the technology, preserving user privacy and creating safer spaces for everyone,” says Savvides. “These shared values make Oosto an ideal research partner for CMU to advance object, body and behavioral recognition and to positively impact our collective safety.”
Over the past 10 years, more than 400 startups linked to CMU have raised more than $7 billion in funding, according to the announcement. CMU has a long history in artificial intelligence including the creation of the first AI computer program in 1956 and pioneering work in self-driving cars, facial recognition and natural language processing.
Savvides was named one of the “2020 Outstanding Contributors to AI” awards from the former U.S. Secretary of the Army. His research has been focused on developing core AI and machine-learning algorithms that were successfully applied for robust face detection, face recognition, iris biometrics, and most recently, general object detection and scene understanding. Savvides has generated over 35 patents and patent publications, and over 50 unpublished patent applications to date.
“Under the leadership of Professor Savvides, CMU’s CyLab Biometric Research Center has an impressive track record of successfully transferring AI research out of a lab environment and into reliable and scalable solutions,” adds Golan. “Visual intelligence is in its infancy and there is so much more work yet to be done. With this partnership, we now have an elite U.S.-based AI research center that will work in concert with our existing AI teams to accelerate the development of advanced deep learning algorithms and exploration of new safety-related use cases, markets, and industries, including medical, payments, and smart cities.”
As part of these corporate rebranding efforts, the company is also renaming its products to OnWatch (formerly A Better Tomorrow), OnAccess (formerly Abraxas) and OnPatrol.
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