User:104gli/DeepScale

DeepScale, Inc. is a privately held, U.S. based technology company headquartered in Mountain View, CA. DeepScale develops perceptual system technologies for automated vehicles.

History
DeepScale was co-founded by Dr. Forrest Iandola and Prof. Kurt Keutzer in September 2015. DeepScale is focused on bringing efficient deep neural networks to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Vehicles. In 2018, DeepScale raised US $15 Million in Series A funding. The funding round was led by two funds: Point72, which is the personal fund of billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen, and next47, which is a billion-dollar venture fund backed by Siemens. In 2018, DeepScale announced strategic partnerships with automotive suppliers including Visteon and Hella Aglaia Mobile Vision GmbH.

Technology
Prior to the founding of DeepScale, Forrest Iandola and Kurt Keutzer worked together at University of California, Berkeley, on making deep neural networks (DNNs) more efficient. In 2016, shortly after the founding of DeepScale, Iandola, Keutzer, and their collaborators released SqueezeNet, which is a small and energy-efficient DNN. By developing smaller DNNs, DeepScale has been able to run deep learning on scaled-down processing hardware such as smartphones and automotive-grade chips. In 2018, DeepScale said that its engineering team had moved beyond SqueezeNet and that it had developed even faster and more accurate DNNs for use in commercial products.

Product
DeepScale develops perceptual system software which uses deep neural networks to enable cars to interpret their environment. The software is designed for integration into an open platform, where a wide range of sensors and processors can be used. DeepScale's software is able to interpret data from sensors including cameras, radar, and lidar. The software is able to run on a variety of processors, ranging from NVIDIA GPUs to smaller ARM-based processing chips that are designed specifically for the automotive market.

In January 2019, DeepScale launched an automotive perception software product called Carver. Carver uses deep neural networks to perform object detection, lane identification, and drivable area identification. To accomplish this, Carver uses three neural networks which run in parallel. While running in real-time, these three networks perform a total of 0.6 tera-operations per second. As a point of reference, 0.6 tera-ops/sec is only 2 percent of the 30 tera-ops/sec that the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier embedded computing system is rated to perform.

Awards and recognition
In December 2016, VentureBeat named DeepScale one of the "15 interesting startups to watch in 2017," alongside computer vision company Clarifai and augmented reality company Magic Leap. In December 2018, the AI Time Journal listed DeepScale as one of the "Top 25 Artificial Intelligence Companies of 2018." In February 2019, DeepScale was featured alongside SenseTime and Graphcore in the CB Insights AI 100, which consists of "the most promising 100 AI startups working across the artificial intelligence value chain, from hardware and data infrastructure to industrial applications."