RK Anand Podcast Transcript
RK Anand joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is RK Anand. RK Anand is Founder and Chief Product Officer at Rekogni. With more than 30 years in technology, RK has held multiple senior engineering and product management roles in companies such as Juniper Networks and Sun Microsystems.
Well, good afternoon. RK. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:33] RK Anand: Good afternoon, Brian. A pleasure to meet you.
[00:00:35] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Looking forward to this all day. Believe me. Love jumping out of the bed, meeting someone new every single day and getting an opportunity to turn around and share your story with our global audience, which means the world to me. So, thank you again.
RK, jumping into the questions here, let’s talk about your career in technology. You were a senior executive, an entrepreneur, now the Founder and Chief Product Officer of Recogni. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:05] RK Anand: Yeah. Thank you for the question, Brian. I think I’d be just very fortunate from a career perspective. Early in my career, I came to Silicon Valley and joined a company called Sun Microsystems and had exceptional managers, managers who gave me the freedom to explore and just were very supportive.
and they became very good examples of how I should be. If and when I became manager I think and then, it was a great place. Sun Microsystems was a great place where it was at the forefront of technology and you could just innovate and you could be, you’re surrounded by just incredibly gifted and talented people.
And following that, I joined Juniper Networks as one of the founding engineers and it’s employee number 12 and some of the company go from zero to over 10, 000 people and over 4 billion in revenue. So, I think luck plays an important role in this, I would say from a career perspective, but opportunity.
And I think having the good fortune to be surrounded by people who are smarter than you. And most importantly, being always excited about some new technology. A new advancement, a new idea, a new area. And I think having the early career guidance from very good mentors gave me, I guess the courage to go and venture to new things.
So that’s how I got here.
[00:02:21] Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s awesome. Obviously having some guidance, some great mentors having great teams to work around with, or for, or for you. And then again, you mentioned having that interest, curiosity, or passion into some of that new technology, which we talk about a lot here.
So, thank you again. And RK working in the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, right? The ADAS that we talk about in your business, your platform touts state of the art visual perception for autonomous vehicles. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?
[00:02:53] RK Anand: We operate in a three-dimensional world, right?
Whether we walk down the street or drive a car, we’re navigating, along the way, people, pedestrians, traffic lights when you step off the curb, we’re careful and how do we do that? We perceive the world, we perceive it to the best of our abilities, obviously given the fact that we have faculties like hearing and sight and others, other sensing modalities.
So, if you think about now making a car operate in a three-dimensional world, you needed to have the same set of capabilities. You needed to actually perceive the world really well. And the proxy for eyes are cameras. And we use cameras extensively in our daily lives now because they’re attached to our phones.
And so cameras are just a wonderful way to passively capture the world. And then most importantly, now you have to process that data and you have to comprehend what is around a vehicle. And so visual comprehension of what is around the vehicle is the most, most important thing because without perceiving the world, you can’t get to the next level of capability, which is to drive in the world.
So close to perfect perception is an essential foundational element for an ADAS. Or an AV autonomous vehicle or a driver assisted vehicle. And so that’s where Recogni plays an important role in building technology that operates really at a high level of performance and consumes very little energy or low power, but can process multiple cameras or multiple sensors.
Giving you incredible amounts of data that then you need to process and give a real time view of the world.
[00:04:26] Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. And it studying like Discovery Health Channel, right? You learn how amazing humans are. And then if you look at it, we’re mimicking the human being able to again, consume low energy, but be able to process yeah.
Many things, sometimes hundreds of actions within a millisecond and provide that real time. And I love how the technology is advancing in this space with ADAS. So thank you again. RK. Talk to us about how you’re focusing on reducing power consumption of autonomous driving systems. You mentioned that previously, and I’d like to dive in a little bit.
[00:04:58] RK Anand: Most definitely. I think we know that cars are going from what’s called internal combustion engine vehicles that burn gasoline to electric cars. The shift from electric cars is an important shift for us, as societies and countries because there are environmental implications and benefits that come as a result of shifting to electric vehicles.
Well, electric vehicles have a fixed amount of capacity or battery charge or battery capacity, and the primary role of that battery in a vehicle is to move the vehicle to make it travel a set distance or set range. So, anything that consumes energy, the away from just that primary function to move to take the makeup of point A to point B.
It diminishes that range, whether it’s turning on an air conditioner or delivering autonomous compute capabilities. So, the critical element of ADAS functionality is perception. Perception is a very compute demanding problem because you get this torrent of data, unrelenting amount of information coming from sensors, let’s say cameras, and you get no break.
You have to process it. So, the higher the resolution, higher the frame rate, higher the compute. So, building actually really efficient compute that can process cameras and from an artificial intelligence point of view, tell you what are the objects along the way, pedestrians or lane markings or traffic lights or whatever, is a critical element of not taking away from that range of the vehicle.
So, lower your consumption. The lower impact on the range. Most importantly, unlike turning on or turning off an air conditioner, you don’t have the luxury to turn off an ADAS or a safety function like perception, because then the car loses the ability to navigate in the three-dimensional world. So it’s a safety constraint that says that this functionality, this computational workload is going to be persistent nonstop when the vehicle is driving.
And so, there’s a second order implication that better be really efficient from a compute perspective and consume as less energy as possible without compromising on quality results, latency and accuracy.
[00:07:08] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And safety, of course, right? That’s the most important element. Absolutely. love how you broke that down.
And think that’s so important. It’s the less we can take away from the overall power consumption of the car will ultimately provide more safety to the people in or around the car. So, thank you. RK, I’m a technologist and technology executive, been doing this for a long time, and I love to get into emerging technologies, right?
Our podcast is focused on that. So, when I ask you a question, you don’t have to get into the weeds, but you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your business. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:07:46] RK Anand: I think the emergence of generative AI and the ability of these models to actually comprehend more and more complex things is an incredible trend. And I think it’s going to that kind of technology is going to be ubiquitous in our lives in our society. And being in that forefront, being in that industry that builds technology for that can do AI workloads and process their workloads. You’re getting a front row seat.
And I think that building, technologists are actually always thinking about how to make the world better and how to solve some things that give us on a planetary scale, the ability for humans to go and do other things free up our time for our creative pursuits. I feel really fortunate sitting at this front row and building with my incredibly gifted colleagues and the industry at large, technology that makes things better.
And I think generative AI will play an equally important role in cars as it will be in everything else in our lives.
[00:08:44] Brian Thomas: Thank you for your perspective on that. Right now, that is the chat of the town is generative AI, conversational AI, and that’s absolutely going to be one of the, I think the pillars moving us forward into this next stage of advanced technology.
So again, appreciate the share. And RK, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:09:05] RK Anand: My pleasure again, Brian. Thank you for the opportunity and my best wishes to you and your colleagues.
[00:09:10] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
RK Anand Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
