I’m passionate about building great products that make people’s lives easier. I am in love with AI and believe in it for its capabilities, but I remain grounded always.

1. Subrat Panda
VP of Engineering, AI and Data Sciences,
Capillary Technologies

2. About me
I’m passionate about building great products that make
people’s lives easier. I am in love with AI and believe in it
for its capabilities, but I remain grounded always.
I grew up in the suburbs of the steel township of Rourkela,
am always curious, and I’m humbled and excited to be
presenting my life experiences to all of you!
I also am a technology advisor to multiple startups. I also
co-founded IDLI - Indian Deep Learning Initiative.

3. Overall career journey, experiences, learning, life
in startups, how should startup teams work

4. Journey so far
BTech,
PhD,
CSE, IIT
KGP
Synopsys,
IBM STG,
NVIDIA
Taro Capillary
Research, Problem
Solving, Basics,
Patience, Perseverance,
Experimenting, Dreaming,
Startups, Spirituality,
Books
Applied Research, Product
Building, Debugging, Scale,
Big Picture, Timelines,
Mentoring, Networking,
Collaboration, Politics,
Patenting, CPU/GPUs, Cross-
Geos
B2C, Execution Competence,
Remote Collaboration,
Building Software, XaaS,
Long hours, Scale, Mobile
and Web, Customer
Awareness, Company Setup,
Logistics, Global
B2B, SaaS, Experimenting,
Team Building, Dynamics,
Product Alignment,
Innovation, Patenting,
Customer Experience, Power
of Data, IoT, Cloud, Scale,
Hard Problems, Big Data,
Cloud Integrations, Product
ownership - end to end

5. Life in Startups
To Dos:
- Hustle and Learn
- Try and Fail Fast rather than just
deliberating
- Ideas have ZERO value till executed
- You are 1/xth of the team (x is a small
number)
- Radical Transparency
- Discipline
- Over Communicate
- Align with the big picture
- POLR - Path of Least Resistance
- Availability
- Build, build and build
- Be accountable and hold others
accountable
- ReUse
- Stay Relevant and Humble
- Be comfortable with Uncertainty

6. Life in Startups
(More important)
ToDo/Think Nots:
- Path of pure exploration
- Projects without !/$
analysis
- No Tracking / Visibility
- Expect only Innovative
work
- Product building is easy
- Over Optimism
- Frog in the Well Syndrome
- Fear Failures

7. My AI journey

8. Technology Phases - Clearing out the fluff
- Took a break, few online courses, referred a few books, read papers, got my
hands dirty, talked to academicians, Industry professionals
- Followed the leaders in the Industry - twitter, fb, linkedin, hbr
- Training, Inference - Infrastructure - connect the dots

9. How should startup
teams work?

10. 2 Pillars of Successful Teams

11. Success Stories
- For me Success is in doing something which others feel cannot be done.

12. Product - First AI powered People Counter
Our accuracy is above 95% in all store conditions with 100% uptime
Our competitors use conventional blob detection methods while we use
proprietary ML based algorithm which gives vastly superior results. We have
filed 3 patents for that.

13. Objects and their key features
detection
Representative images of training dataset
Obj ID: Person
Confidence: 98%
Head
Our machine learning algorithm has been trained to identify
humans from the top view with specific training dataset of over
3 million (12 million including negative sample) visitor
impressions collected over 6 months.

14. Other Areas of Work - Multiple success and failure stories
- Instore Intelligence : Audio, Video Processing on Store Floor, Visual Loyalty
- Python, AWS Elastic Inference, NodeJS, micro services, Containers
- Personalization, Recommendation, Insights
- Spark, BigData, ML, Containers, Databricks, Airflow, MLFlow
- Some other time

15. Contact
Subrat Panda
subratpanda@gmail.com
http://subratpanda.googl
epages.com
Twitter: @subratpanda
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com
/in/subratpanda/
IDLI: Indian Deep
Learning Initiative
https://www.facebook.com
/groups/idliai

16. Brief Introduction about me
● BTech ( 2002) , PhD (2009) – CSE, IIT Kharagpur
● Synopsys (EDA), IBM (CPU), NVIDIA (GPU), Taro (Full Stack Engineer), Capillary
(VP of Engineering - AI and Data Sciences)
● Applying AI to Retail
● Co-Founded IDLI (for social good) with Prof. Amit Sethi (IIT Bombay), Jacob Minz
(Synopsys) and Biswa Gourav Singh (Capillary)
● https://www.facebook.com/groups/idliai/
● Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/subratpanda/
● Twitter - @subratpanda

17. Acknowledgements
- https://www.juliehyde.com.au/what-is-lack-of-clarity-costing-you/
- https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=competence-10-deck
- https://www.printwand.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-your-new-product-launch
- https://businessday.ng/columnist/article/technology-and-our-post-oil-future/
- http://bilalqambrani.blogspot.com/2015/03/research-methodlogy.html
- I have taken the images from these sources