Zebra Technologies Takes British University’s AI Spin-out Global

Zebra Technologies is taking AI computer vision global with a portfolio as well as research and development that is infusing ‘AI eyes’ into technology that businesses and their workers are using today.

“We’re bringing computer vision to businesses and their customers and workers with our global team of AI researchers developing new ways to make computer vision, as well as generative AI, voice AI and machine learning useful for the retail, CPG, healthcare, logistics and other industries,” said Stuart Hubbard, Senior Director of AI and Advanced Development, Zebra Technologies.

Hubbard joined Zebra five years ago as part of the acquisition of Cortexica, an Imperial College London spin-out founded by Anil Bharath, Professor of Biologically Inspired Computation and Inference, Imperial College London.

Computer vision is often built on a special type of deep learning known as a convolutional neural network (CNN) which is made up of many layers of interconnected nodes (neurons), bearing similarities to the neural network connections in the visual cortex of the human brain. These layers perform feature learning and classification before delivering an output.

Cortexica’s brain-inspired technology was swiftly taken up by high street supermarkets, national retailers in the UK and U.S., e-commerce platforms, and world-famous marathon races and tennis competitions.  Its successes drew the attention of Zebra, who saw the potential that Cortexica’s computer vision technology could have for its own customer base, which led to an acquisition in 2019.

In addition to the company’s computer vision prowess, Zebra also gained Hubbard, who now leads Zebra’s wider CTO AI and advanced development teams, and Andrea Mirabile, Director of AI Research at Zebra, who was one of Bharath’s postgraduate students at Imperial researching bioengineering and neurotechnology and now leads Zebra’s AI research team.

Hubbard cites the example of how time-consuming, haphazard scrolling and tapping through fresh fruit, vegetable and pastry lists at the self-checkout is fast becoming a thing of the past. Modern self-checkout scanners equipped with Zebra’s computer vision can see items and bring them on screen quickly for the shopper. They can also pair products and scanned barcodes to make sure they match – a useful way to reduce accidental mis-scans and deliberate fraud which costs retailers substantial losses.

“We’re creating new ways of working by powering secure tech innovations such as AI, where planning and execution systems merge and bring a range of AI applications – voice, vision, speech, text – together to help businesses and front-line workers sense, analyse, and act with AI tools,” said Mirabile. “After all, neural networks in the brain can’t function alone, they need our senses to become useful, and we’re making that real for AI too.”