INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Alice Lloyd George
Contributor
Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a
series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology
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Below are excerpts from the most recent episode of the Flux podcast hosted by RRE Ventures principal Alice Lloyd
George.
AMLG: Welcome back to the pod
I&m excited to be here withDr
He is the co-founder and CEO ofNanita leading human analytics company that uses computer vision to help parents navigate their child sleep
Essentially it a baby data collector that every sleep-deprived geek parent has dreamed of
A little background on Assaf: He got his Ph.D
at the Technion in Israel and was previously at Applied Materials as well as Wales where he worked on solutions for missile defense systems
Nanit was born here in New York at Cornell Tech [disclosure — RRE is a long-standing investor in the company.] Welcome Assaf
it great to have you.
AG: Thank you for having me.
AMLG: I&ve got a stat here, that on average parents lose 44 days of sleep during the
first year of their baby life and nearly 3 in 10 babies have problems sleeping at night
Those numbers sum up the nature of what you&re trying to solve, but can you lay out how you identified this problem and started the
company
AG: It started for me as a parent
You have your baby, you arrive home and you see that your life has changed
Pretty quickly you understand what your number one concern is — sleep
You&re tired, you&re sleep deprived
You wake up during the night and do everything necessary to go back to sleep
You&re going to Google and going to friends
This is where Nanit comes in
We are giving you the information that will allow you to make better decisions for your child
Six years ago I had my first child, Udi
He was born when I was at the Technion
I&m a computer vision guy
Before I was at the Technion I worked at Applied Materials in the semiconductor industry, on a camera that you put above the silicon slices,
to see them from a bird eye perspective.
AMLG: So you were doing computer vision for chip manufacturing — on the assembly
lines, you&d look for errors in the chips
AG: Yes
And when my son was born I said, OK let do process control for my baby.
AMLG: As if the baby was on an assembly line like a chip, just run
some computer vision on it.
AG: Yeah
So I wrote a paper on background subtraction algorithms — how to find a foreground object differentiated from the
background — and applied those algorithms to my baby
I went to my advisors at the Technion and told them, you know, I&ve found that my baby is moving 134 times on average at night
But what can you do with that I was looking at this data and I said sleep, sleep is what we need to solve here
I went to sleeping labs to try to understand sleep science
Then I moved as a postdoc to Cornell University where I joined the Runway Program, which aims to commercialize science.
TheJacobs
instituteis a joint venture between Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, operating as an independent entity within
The Institute emphasizes a trans-disciplinary view of science and encourages translational research to serves the common good, through a set
of industry-focused &hubs& that address contemporary needs.AMLG: So you moved from Israel.
AG: I moved from Israel to where the customers
are, which is New York.
AMLG: We also have the most anxious parents on the planet.
AG: Haha yes
I would say that New York is very inspiring
In terms of the culture, the diversity, it a great place to be.
AMLG: Tell me about the program at Cornell.
AG: It&sa joint venture for
Cornell and Technion University
We were six postdocs that started in this program
Peretz Lavie the president of the Technion, he a sleep expert, a sleep guru I would say
He helped us reach out to experts around the world in sleep development and cognitive development
Then we developed Nanit with them.
Dr Peretz Lavieis a world-renowned sleep expert and has been President of the Technion since 2009
Watch his interview on sleep research here.AMLG: Sleep science — as you got into that field, what did you discover and what
were you surprised by as you engaged with the science for the first time — I imagine people have focused more on adults than
babiesAG: The development of infant sleep is fascinating
How we move between stages
How to differentiate between awake, asleep, deep sleep, REM sleep.
AMLG: Do babies have deep sleep and REM sleep as well
AG: When they are
They have two states, awake and asleep
And over time —
AMLG: Like an on off switch.
AG: Haha it a bit more, but I&m not sure that we fully understand all the processes
during the first few weeks
They dream much more than adults
And you see their architecture developing
One of the first experts that I worked with is Professor Avi Sadeh
I reached out to him through Peretz Lavie, as he developed the gold standard of how to measure sleep
The hypothesis is that movement is an indication of asleep and awake states, and with a camera you know much more
You draw the silhouette of the baby, you can detect the eyes
You can track the different parts of the body and you have better resolution
Today we measure sleep better than the state of the art medical devices
When you do it with a camera it powerful because you can capture a lot of things around the sleep architecture
In our case we track the parent
When you look at this behavior — sleep and parent intervention patterns — you can give tips and recommendations
for parents on how to improve, how to teach their baby to sleep on its own.
AMLG: As your user base gets bigger you&re going to have a lot
of anonymized metadata that will give you insights—such as the more times you interrupt the baby sleep or the more times you leave it
alone, this is the effect
So is it the parent-child insights that you&re looking to get
Meet Nanit [onYoutube]AG: If you look at studies on sleep, we&re talking
With Nanit you are exposed tothousandsof babies sleeping in their natural environment
By looking at their behavior over time we learn new things
Sleep training is awareness and education
You&re building awareness with the data and the videos
We give parents information about how their week was in comparison to other babies of that age
There are no secrets — if you have the data you can use triggers to give tips to parents
For instance, I saw that your baby is capable of putting himself back to sleep during the night
Why don''t you wait one or two minutes before you enter the room.
AMLG: On the hardware side, can you share the journey there
You used to do manufacturing in the United States and you&ve moved that to China
What have you learned — how have margins improved How did you scale up volume What are your learnings about
manufacturing
China continues to dominate United States electronics imports
Source: IHS MarkAG: I&ll try to make it short
It really hard to build mass production lines in the United States for commodity consumer goods
From a labor perspective, prices in the United States are high
Over time it won''t exist in the United States as there is strong competition from China
But because it is a consumer product, having your designer, engineers and even the line close to you geographically is much more convenient
If you&re looking at the United States market, the engineers are also parents, which helps you explain the value proposition of your
It important that even the engineer who designs the circuit board understands what it means to have an LED that is strong enough above the
In general every engineer needs to have the product in mind when he does the design
Once we reached a stage that we had a line in the right yield and capacity, we did the transition to China
But it is expensive to work in this way, to start in the United States then move to China
Nanit also has an RD center in Israel
Which means that now I&m working in three time zones
Most of our RD is on the software side and on the hardware side we try to outsource when possible
If I had to choose I would choose Israel and the United States
AMLG: How have you found pulling those resources together and acquiring
You&ve obviously got a strategic advantage with the connection to Israel, but any insights on how you attract and retain the top talent,
especially in machine learning
AG: Finding the right talent for your company is a search problem
The world is big and in different parts of the world there are different types of talent
In Israel there is great talent for backend engineers and computer vision, and we hire those people in Israel
In the United States there great talent in marketing, sales, business development, brand development, human centric
design — for those, New York is a great place to be
In China you find talent related to manufacturing and they are very good at it
In the past it was hard to build a company in this way
The world changed in the sense of how we communicate
The only thing that hasn''t been solved yet is time zones
If everyone slept at the same time that would help
But besides the time zones, technology today can solve a lot of problems
Nanit couldn''t exist a couple of years ago when we didn''t have this.
AMLG: Right you wouldn''t have been able to do it all in Israel or
all in New York or all in China
What about on the machine learning side — what is going on on a more macro level there
AG: Deep learning and convolutional
neural networks are amazing tools that help us do things we weren''t able to do before
Thanks to deep learning, today I can tell you the baby position in the crib better than the human eye
But what happened is that it was so disruptive that many other parts of the computer vision field, you started seeing them less and less at
Add to this the fact that it generates lots of value for companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft —
AMLG: So machine learning has
become dominated by big platforms like Google and Apple, and perhaps research for research sake is a valuable thing and not just having it
all steered towards revenue or commercial applications
You&re saying it important to have pure research
AG: This is what research is about
It should be pure.
AMLG: Do you know Gary MarcusHe came on this podcast last year, and his point about these companies is that when you&re a
hammer everything looks like a nail
When you have a ton of data — you&re Google or Facebook — everything looks like you should apply deep learning
But that their bias and perhaps it skews out other approaches to machine learning.
AG: Also I would say it becomes a commodity over time
I believe the next innovation will be around behavioral analysis, which is the next level of computer vision
We are working on research collaborations that study small twitches of a baby, which could be an indicator of neurological disorders
There is a next level of behavioral neuroscience, it a fascinating field that is going to develop over the next couple of years.
AMLG: So
you have this background in Israeli defense where you worked on missile defense systems
Can you share anything about that or how it informed what you&re doing now Working in that environment is quite different than having a
startup in New York.
AG: I was in a foundational team in the Nineties for a new defense system
It took me a couple of years to understand that I was a beta tester
They used me to understand the human factor
How to communicate between operators, how to design the screens
I cannot explain how much this experience has helped me to go through the design phase for Nanit
How to do design sprints with parents, how to design the screens
The army is an amazing human resource filter that allocates hundreds of thousands of teenagers to specific positions and trains them in a
short time and gives them practical experience
They are doing an amazing job
There are mistakes of course, but they took me and others and decided this is what you are going to do
They gave me tools for things that in the future were of great benefit to me.
AMLG: How does working on missile defense UX or chip
manufacturing compare to baby monitoring
AG: Ha well I continue to serve as a major in reserve
But in life I decided that I wanted to make a shift to deal with more human problems
What is nice about semiconductors is that they are designed by humans not by nature
Babies were designed by nature, which is more complex
When you have a blueprint you know exactly what you&re looking for, what kind of patterns
Then you can reach a level of analysis, of process control that is much higher
But the challenges with babies you know is —
AMLG: They&re more of a mystery.
AG: It a lot of mystery
But my philosophy is to build the scientific fundamentals, the building blocks, and on top of that you think about how to make it
approachable for the consumer space and how to build a value proposition
You start with science not marketing statements
This is where you start.
AMLG: A world of more ambient data capture where you&re continually monitored
Which feeds into preventative medicine
Obviously there a lot of people that get nervous about that, though it the way the whole world is going, we&re going to more data and it
But as you push that conversation forward, do you feel like there challenges in terms of getting people used to the idea
AG: You need to do
But we can live a much better life
We will have better parenting experiences, sleep better at night
Even know things about ourselves that we didn''t know before.
U.S Census Bureau Research 1961-2008***Further reading:
Enchanted World of
SleepDraws upon a vast store of professional knowledge innovative concepts of the physiology of sleep dreams to tell us…www.amazon.com
