About
Founded and led by veterans of the online search and advertising industry, Haileo's team is expertly versed in the latest research and methods of unsupervised machine learning and unstructured data mining that is the basis of Haileo's technology. Just as a text search engine crawls the Web and indexes it in terms keywords and phrases, Haileo's Visual Engine crawls the Web and indexes images and videos in terms of shapes, patterns, colors and visual objects. For example, given an image or video input of a Burberry handbag, the Haileo Engine can see, understand and match the bag's distinctive checked pattern to similar items from across the entire Web. Recognizing visual cues in conjunction with text input is Haileo's primary technological advantage that allows the company to address the needs of multiple players in the online fashion marketplace – the consumer, content owner and merchant.
Leadership
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Himawan Gunadhi, Founder and Chief Executive Officer Himawan brings a diverse set of skills and experiences in the management of technological innovation and the value creation process for startups. Prior to co-founding Haileo, he served for three years as founding COO, CFO and VP of Corporate Development at NetSeer, Inc., a breakthrough, concept-based ad targeting company, where he led the effort to develop business, financial, product and market entry strategies. Previously, Himawan was the President and CEO of WiseNut, Inc., an algorithmic search engine startup based in Santa Clara, CA. He launched WiseNut's global and Japanese search engines, leading to its syndication to InfoSpace, Lycos Japan, Excite Japan and other portals. Under his leadership, WiseNut launched a successful joint-venture in Korea and was acquired in 2002 by publicly traded LookSmart Ltd. Himawan also served as strategy consultant to Overture Services (now Yahoo!), advisory board member to Premier Guide, Inc., (now Local.com) and played leading roles in successfully incubating two SaaS vertical enterprise startups. He began his industry career as Practice Director of IT Strategy Consulting at Gartner, Inc., where he was a top global performer in revenue and sales. Himawan received the BBA (Honours) in Finance from the National University of Singapore, and Ph.D. in Management Science from the Haas School of Business, the University of California, Berkeley, and has held academic positions at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and National University of Singapore where he currently serves as Consulting Professor for their US technopreneurship programs. |
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Vwani Roychowdhury, Founder and Chief Scientist Vwani thrives in contributing new ideas that challenge conventional wisdom. Prior to forming Haileo, he co-founded NetSeer, Inc., first serving as its Chief Executive Officer and now as Chief Scientist and Director. Vwani is also a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is an internationally recognized researcher in mathematics, statistics, physics, electrical engineering and computer science. Vwani is known for his innovative problem solving in the fields of learning theory and systems, statistical modeling and processing of large-scale and high dimensional datasets, peer-to-peer (P2P) networking and complex systems, distributed and parallel processing, bioinformatics, quantum computing and nanoelectronics. He has consulted with major corporations including Intel, HP, AT&T, IBM and Warner Bros., has co-authored three books on artificial intelligence and neural networks, has written over 150 technical and scientific publications, holds numerous U.S. patents, and has been featured by The New Scientist, Nature, The Guardian, and the BBC for his breakthroughs in social networks and dynamics, spam filtering and P2P networking. Vwani received the B. Tech. from IIT Kanpur in India, and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering. |
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Nima Sarshar, Founder and Chief Technology Officer Nima oversees all aspects of the design and implementation of Haileo's core technologies. He has a broad range of expertise in image and video analytics, large-scale information processing, distributed algorithms for network information processing, and P2P computing. Nima is utilizing these diverse set of tools to create and nurture Haileo's core technologies for web-scale processing, understanding and matching of multimedia contents, and delivering services to monetize multimedia. Prior to co-founding Haileo, he was a Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Regina in Canada. Nima has published more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed professional and academic conferences and journals, and received best paper awards at the IEEE P2P 2004 and the SPIE Visual Computing and Image Processing 2008. He also co-authored the book "Network-aware Source Coding and Communications," published by Cambridge University Press. Nima was the founder of the video analytics company EKWA-Tech, and a founding member of the San Francisco based intelligent video surveillance company ivisiotech.com. Nima received his BS from Sharif University in Iran, his MS from UCLA and his PhD from McMaster University in Canada, all in Electrical Engineering. |
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Sudhir Kumar Singh, Founder and Vice President, Technology Sudhir leads Haileo’s core scientific team in developing the revolutionary technology and algorithms that define our vision. He is an accomplished and experienced researcher in a diverse set of fields, including: algorithms, computational complexity, convex optimization, information theory, machine learning, computer vision, game theory, information & Internet economics, and quantum computing. Sudhir has published fundamental contributions in these fields in reputed journals and conferences, and his work have been featured in popular news portals such as New Scientist and IEEE Spectrum. Prior to joining Haileo, he held research positions at UCLA and NetSeer, Inc. Sudhir is a believer in his ability to delve and innovate in the fundamental topics at the heart of information processing. His current passion is in enabling, understanding, and harnessing the information explosion in the Web era. Sudhir received BS and MS degrees in Mathematics and Computing from IIT Kharagpur in India, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. |
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Michael Scolari, Senior Director, Business Development Michael spearheads business development, leveraging his extensive global experience and contacts in search engines, multimedia, eCommerce, social commerce, and mobile applications and content. As Director of Business Development at pioneering comparison shopping engine mySimon, he established strategic distribution relationships with marketers, leading to its acquisition by CNET. As Vice President of Sales and Business Development at algorithmic search engine WiseNut, Inc., Michael was instrumental in syndicating its services to major customers in the US, Europe and Asia, prior to its acquisition by LookSmart Ltd. He also served as Vice President of Strategic Internet Accounts at FAST Search and Transfer, where he built up key strategic accounts in the US and Japan. Michael has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Santa Clara University. |
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Sunghoon Choi, Principal Engineer Sunghoon leads the development of Haileo's core technology platform, bringing 15 years of full life-cycle development experience including requirement analysis, system architecture and project implementation. Sunghoon has expertise in developing complex Linux and Windows applications, concurrent networks with millions of connections, distributed and highly scalable systems, and handling of massive data sets. Prior to Haileo, he was a senior software engineer at Yahoo! where he developed and enhanced their web crawling system. He has played key development roles for established and emerging companies, including Samsung SDSA, WiseNut, LookSmart and Arcadia. Sunghoon received the BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from Seoul National University in Korea. |
