Innovators wanted

With an education in computer vision, machine learning and intelligent transportation systems Clément Dardenne was perfect for a job at Smart Eye. His French background means extra perspectives and an extra language added. That is good for all the international contacts included in the job.

Clement came to Smart Eye for an ‘end of student internship’ spring 2018 and just five month later he has already been hired.

– I work in the ‘Motion’ project were companies and universities work together with the goal is to get a better understanding of children’s behavior and how they are interacting with their environment, says Clément.

Deep learning
He is also working with the Deep Learning team on several projects, for instance try to improve head pose estimation, object detection, image detection and image augmentation to get a good performance in the neural networks.

– I think the work we do here is at the cutting edge of technology and science, says Clément.

Autonomous vehicles
Clément is specialized in computer visions which is a very broad subject. The working tasks include a lot of machine learning, camera calibration, 3D reconstruction of faces and putting out markers to be able to see emotions – angry, sad and sleepy for example.

“My dream is to work with autonomous vehicles. I think my knowledge will be useful in that field. But I don’t believe in total autonomous cars at the moment, humans still have to be present. But maybe in the future”, says Clément.

Head and eye tracking information can be really useful to researchers. Solmaz Shahmehr and her team members, at Research Instruments, provide equipment at the very forefront of technology.

But it is not always easy to be working with cutting edge technology. When you are at the absolute front and the industry is behind you.

The most challenging and fun part of the job is being able to affect the industrial trends. Because we’re building a technology that is always ahead of the industry” says Solmaz.

Groundbreaking technology
During the 10 years she has been at Smart Eye, head and eye tracking has improved a lot. We are now seeing the technique out on the market used, for examples, in cars on the roads.
”It’s really fascinating to see that our technology has been deployed in serial production car programs such as Geely and BMW. It will help reduce accidents and make driving safer” says Solmaz.

Well-trained engineer and leader
Solmaz has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science in Software Engineering and Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. She is a curious, positive person that enjoys her challenging role at Smart Eye.
”I see a challenge as something that I can learn from, and that makes it fun to me”, Solmaz concludes.

Driver monitoring is the next big thing in automotive industry and Smart Eye is one of the key players in this field. Peter Rundberg uses all of his technical expertise to make the company stay there.

His title is Technical Expert and that includes a lot of skills. It really means that he helps the customers get the most out of Smart Eyes products.

– There is so much happening in this business at the moment, so you need to stay sharp, says Peter.

Increases safety
Smart Eye provides software for understanding the driver in the driving scenario. Cameras focus the drivers face and the cabin and an algorithm review the state of the driver. This tech is useful because it can increase safety. If the car knows that the driver is falling asleep maybe it can come to a controlled stop, in the future.

– We offer cameras with active illumination that makes it possible to film even in complete darkness. The output from our driver monitoring algorithms can be blended with many sensors in the car to make a complete map of the situation, Peter explains.

Diverse team
Peter appreciates his talented colleagues – mathematicians, programmers and technicians from all around the globe. Solving problems together with them makes the job interesting.

– Working at Smart Eye is really fun. I am very much a problem solver. If there is a problem, I need to solve it. At Smart eye we do that every day and I love it!, says Peter.

Good communication is always important. But it´s crucial when you work with developing technology that will be used for safety. For Marcus Christensson and his team understanding problems and solving them is a huge part of the job.

Marcus team focus on software projects towards the automotive industry were the customer has their own hardware platform and Smart Eye integrate a library of products on it.

“It´s important to solve problems together with the customer and make our products work well with their existing technique”, says Marcus.

Using AI
Smart Eye uses Artificial Intelligence together with traditional algorithms to better achieve an efficient system and handling the enormous data which originates from head and eye tracking. Sometimes there are so many corner cases that it´s hard to cover.

“As an engineer involved in testing or debugging a complex system I often run into corner cases. Anomalies that only occurs at some specificoccasions. Using AI can be a neat approach to handle such cases”, Marcus explains.

Human behavior

The main usage of Automotive Solutions products is to make cars understand if the driver is sleeping or if he/she is not focused on the task. It can measure how alert the driver is, and help if needed. It involves a lot of work to accomplish this.

”I like Smart Eye because it’s a very high-tech company. We are trying to understand human behavior which is a hard challenge. In order to do that, we need advanced algorithms with a high technical depth” says Marcus.