MARIOS SAVVIDES
DIRECTOR AND FOUNDER

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Professor Marios Savvides is the Bossa Nova Robotics Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the Founder and Director of the Biometrics Center at Carnegie Mellon University and a Full Tenured Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He received his Bachelor of Engineering in Microelectronics Systems Engineering from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1997 in the United Kingdom, his Master of Science in Robotics from the Robotics Institute in 2000 and his PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at CMU in 2004.

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His research is focused on developing core AI and machine-learning algorithms that were successfully applied for robust face detection, face recognition, iris biometrics, and most recently, general object detection and scene understanding.  He and his team were the first in the world to develop a long-range iris capture and matching system capable of acquiring irises up to 12m away in an unconstrained manner. His recent work includes ranking first in Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Applications competition for hand detection on steering wheels in natural challenging driving conditions.  Some of his recent work can detect heavily occluded faces and objects in general under very challenging real-world conditions, developing low-shot object detection and recognition utilizing only a small number of images.

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His early achievements include leading the R&D in CMU's participation in NIST's Open Face Recognition Grand Challenge 2005, ranking first in both Academia and Industry. Professor Savvides and his team also participated in NIST's Iris Challenge Evaluation resulting in CMU to rank first in Academia and second against iris commercial vendors. Professor Savvides was then chosen as one of four researchers to form the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s first Center of Academic Excellence in Science and Technology in the area of biometrics and advanced algorithm development.

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Professor Savvides spun off a CMU startup called HawXeye with one of his former students where he served as CTO. As the CTO, he assembled a team and lead the research and productization of efficient, fast, low-form factor AI algorithms making current generation of home security cameras smarter where the AI algorithms developed have been deployed to over 6 million ADT home security cameras with a successful exit.

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From 2018-2020  he served as the Chief AI Scientist of Bossa Nova Robotics, where he and his CMU research team, completely re-built from ground-up the AI algorithms for Bossa Nova robots for performing real-time inventory analysis and scaling the autonomous robot deployment of this inventory analysis AI from 20 stores to deploying 550 autonomous robots in 500 retail stores while completely removing any Human-in-the-Loop (HITL). In 2021-2023 he served as the Chief AI Scientist of Facial Recognition company Oosto working on real-time video analytics for ensuring safety in work zones and camera technology that could be deployed to enhance school safety.

 

In 2023 he founded UltronAI focusing on Next Generation AI for Retail, designing the next generation Self-Checkout using Visual AI by replacing the barcode, developing real-time analytics to address the $112billion/yr theft/shrink problem in retail, on-shelf analytics and cart validation AI using 80+ patents and developing the World's 1st Retail Foundation Models that are energy efficient running on 2-3W Hailo AI accelerator and Jetson Nano embedded platforms. 

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He has authored and co-authored over 250 journal and conference publications, including 22 book chapters and served as the area editor of the Springer's Encyclopedia of Biometrics and recipient of seven Best paper awards/ His IP portfolio includes over 80 filed patent applications with 30 issued patents. He is the recipient of Inventor of the Year Award for his exhaustive patent portfolio by Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association (PIPLA) 2022.

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His work in facial recognition was presented in several talks at the World Economic Forum(WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January 2018. His work has been featured in over 150 news media articles (CNN, Scientific American, CBS 60 Minutes, Popular Mechanics). He is the recipient of CMU’s 2009 Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) Outstanding Research Award,  the Gold Award in the 2015 Edison Awards in Applied Technologies for his biometrics work, 2018 Global Pittsburgh Immigrant Entrepreneur Award in Technological Innovation, the 2020 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award in “Theory of Mind”, the Gold Award in 2020 Edison Awards for Retail Innovations on Autonomous Data Capture and Analysis of On-Shelf Inventory, Inventor of the Year Award by Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association (PIPLA), received a commendation letter from the Pentagon from Undersecretary of Army Mr. James McPherson and also received the  “2020 Outstanding Contributor to AI” award from the US Secretary of the Army, the honorable Mr. Ryan McCarthy for his work in facial analysis and recognition.