Dr. Ashutosh Saxena is the Co-founder and CEO of Caspar.ai. Caspar.ai is building smart homes of the future which interact with you, learns from your preferences and work with you. In 2015 Ashutosh was selected among top 8 innovators to watch by the Smithsonian institution. He is also the recipient of the World Technology Award in 2015. Before Caspar.ai, Ashutosh spent four years as an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he founded Robot Learning Lab and co-founded Zibby. His vision is to build artificial intelligence for embodied systems such as robots, cars, and homes. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence with Prof. Andrew Ng (advisor), Prof. Sebastian Thrun, Prof. Daphne Koller, and Prof. Stephen Boyd.
People spend 60% of their time in homes, but homes still remain the dumbest systems that people interact with today.
Products such as Nest smart thermostat, Amazon Alexa voice assistant, Sonos music are trying to change that, but they are taking a piecemeal approach to making homes smart. At Brain of Things, we get homes designed architecturally and otherwise with automation built in, not as an afterthought, but as a primary objective.
With 100+ sensors and full control of devices in each home (shades, lighting, climate, ...), our automated home assistant Caspar.AI has very rich data to play with. Caspar.AI uses deep learning techniques in order to adapt the home to resident's preferences and make the home do the work for them. In this talk, I will talk about Caspar.AI, some technical challenges, and opportunities in smart home space.