by Angela Guess
Adrian Bridgwater reports in Forbes, “Saqib Shaikh is a software developer from London, England who is currently working for Microsoft on the firm’s Bing search engine. Shaikh lost his sight when he was seven years old. In the pursuit of the freedoms that sighted people all take for granted every day, Shaikh has been personally involved in the development of an application of Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, image recognition and mobile headset technologies. The image analysis processing, cognitive reasoning and speech intelligence in the device Shaikh uses allows him to ‘see’ the world around him in a way that was considered to be part of science fiction as recently as a decade ago.”
Bridgwater goes on, “Shaikh is shown on a video linked here explaining how the specific confluence of technologies he uses helps him. The intelligence comes from ‘Seeing AI’, which is a research project that helps people who are visually impaired or blind to understand who and what is around them. The app is built using intelligence APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services. The app itself runs on smartphones and also on pivothead smartglasses. The glasses are built with a side button that the user touches while wearing to take a snapshot of the world in front of them. The image capture and analysis software that the glasses (or smartphone) uses is able to plug into cloud-based services that will help determine what the user is looking at.”
Photo credit: Microsoft