Forbes applauds work of Bihar-born scientist

PATNA: Bihar-born scientist Ujjwal Verma’s work has recently been applauded by internationally acclaimed Forbes business magazine.
Verma, who is presently serving as the assistant director of Collaborations and Consultancy at Karnataka-based Manipal Institute of Technology, happens to be the leader of the computer vision team which is designing Artificial Intelligence solutions for a Paris based startup company, ‘Cleed’ (acronym for ‘clothes you need’). The team is building an intelligent shopping assistant which could learn the preference of its user and suggest similar clothes. The merger of ‘fashion expertise’ with ‘artificial intelligence’ has been giving wonderful results and brought ‘Cleed’ into limelight. The Forbes magazine, in its latest edition (Winter 2018-19), has termed it as the ‘next Deezer/Sportify’ of the fashion world.

Verma, who is son of Munger University vice-chancellor Ranjit Kumar Verma, has developed algorithms for recognizing the different types and sub-types of clothes and their attributes. Aiming at enhancing the user experience, this recommendation system suggests similar looking clothes based on the user’s preferences and his past purchases. The state-of-the-art image recognition system has been designed by using the ‘Convolutional Neural Network’ and validated on the 500 000+ images data set created by Cleed, says Ujjawal.

Ujjawal is also the convener of the third international conference on ‘distributed computing, VLSI, electrical circuits and robotics’ to be held at MIT in August this year. After doing his MSc and PhD from Rennes and Paris respectively, he was appointed as assistant professor in electronics and communication engineering at MIT, Manipal. He has also been working on the application of computer vision in biological domains.