Tag: DragonflyAI

To be (CEO) or not to be (CEO)

Just because you start a start-up doesn’t mean you have to be the boss (the CEO) running the company… Hamit Soyel didn’t and his research-based company, DragonFlyAI is flourishing.

Hamit’s computer science research (with Peter McOwan) at Queen Mary concerns understanding human (and animal) vision systems. Building on the research of neuroscientists they created computational models of vision systems. These are just programs that work in the way we believe our brains process what we see. If our understanding is correct then the models should see as we see. For example, one aspect of this is how our attention is drawn to some things and not others. If the model is accurate, it should be able to predict things we will definitely notice, and predict things we probably won’t. It turned out their models were really good at this.

They realised that their models had applications in marketing and advertising (an advert that no one notices is a waste of money). They therefore created a startup company based on their research. Peter sadly died not long after the company was founded leaving Hamit to make it a success. He had a choice to make though. Often people who start a startup company set themselves up as the CEO: it is their company so they want control. To do this you need good business skills though and also to be willing to devote the time to make the business a success. You got to this point though because of your technical and creative skills,

When you start a company you want to make a difference, but to actually do that you need a strong team and that team doesn’t have to be “behind” you, they can be “with” you – after all the best teams are made up of specialists who work to their strengths as well as supporting and working well with each other. Perhaps your strengths lie elsewhere, rather than in running a business,

With support from Queen Mary Innovations who helped him set up DragonflyAI and have supported it through its early years, Hamit decided his strengths were in the creative and technical side of the business, so he became the Chief Scientist and Inventor rather than the CEO. That role was handed to an expert as were the other senior leadership roles such as Marketing and Sales, Operations and Customer Success. That meant Hamit could focus on what he did best in further developing the models, as well as in innovating new ideas. This approach also gives confidence to investors that the leadership team do know what they are doing and that if they like the ideas then the company will be a success.

As a result, Hamit’s business is now a big success having helped a whole series of global companies improve their marketing, including Mars and Coca-Cola. DragonflyAI also recently raised $6m in funding from investors to further develop the business.

As Hamit points out:

By delegating operations to a professional leadership team, you can concentrate on areas you truly enjoy that fuel your passion and creativity, ultimately enhancing your fulfilment and contribution to your company and driving collective success.”

To be the CEO or not be the CEO depends on your skills and ambition, but you must also think about what is best for the company, as Hamit has pointed out. It is important to realise though that you do not have to be the CEO just because you founded the company.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London,

based on an interview between Hamit Soyel and Queen Mary Innovations

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This blog is funded through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.

DragonflyAI: I see what you see

What use is a computer that sees like a human? Can’t computers do better than us? Well, such a computer can predict what we will and will not see, and there is BIG money to be gained doing that!

The Hong Kong Skyline.
The Hong Kong Skyline.
Image public domain from wikipedia


Peter McOwan’s team at Queen Mary spent 10 years doing exploratory research understanding the way our brains really see the world, exploring illusions, inventing games to test the ideas, and creating a computer model to test their understanding. Ultimately they created a program that sees like a human. But what practical use is a program that mirrors the oddities of the way we see the world? Surely a computer can do better than us: noticing all the things that we miss or misunderstand? Well, for starters the research opens up exciting possibilities for new applications, especially for marketeers.

The Hong Kong Skyline as seen by DragonflyAI (processed public domain image from wikipedia))


A fruitful avenue to emerge is ‘visual analytics’ software: applications that predict what humans will and will not notice. Our world is full of competing demands, overloading us with information. All around us things vie to catch our attention, whether a shop window display, a road sign warning of danger or an advertising poster.

Imagine, a shop has a big new promotion designed to entice people in, but no more people enter than normal. No-one notices the display. Their attention is elsewhere. Another company runs a web ad campaign, but it has no effect, as people’s eyes are pulled elsewhere on the screen. A third company pays to have its products appear in a blockbuster film. Again, a waste of money. In surveys afterwards no one knew the products had been there. A town council puts up a new warning sign at a dangerous bend in the road but the crashes continue. These are examples of situations where predicting where people look in advance allows you to get it right. In the past this was either done by long and expensive user testing, perhaps using software that tracks where people look, or by having teams of ‘experts’ discuss what they think will happen. What if a program made the predictions in a fraction of a second beforehand? What if you could tweak things repeatedly until your important messages could not be missed.

Queen Mary’s Hamit Soyel turned the research models into a program called DragonflyAI, which does exactly that. The program analyses all kinds of imagery in real-time and predicts the places where people’s attention will, and will not, be drawn. It works whether the content is moving or not, and whether it is in the real world, completely virtual, or both. This then gives marketeers the power to predict and so influence human attention to see the things they want. The software quickly caught the attention of big, global companies like NBC Universal, GSK and Jaywing who now use the technology.

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