Hartmut Neven

Neven co-founded two companies, Eyematic for which he served as CTO and Neven Vision which he initially led as CEO. At Eyematic he developed face recognition technology and real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation.[6] Teams led by Neven have repeatedly won top scores in government sponsored tests designed to determine the most accurate face recognition software.[7] Face filters, now ubiquitous on mobile phones, were launched for the first time by Neven Vision on the networks of NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone Japan in 2003. Neven Vision also pioneered mobile visual search for camera phones. [8][9] Neven Vision was acquired by Google in 2006.[10]

At Google he managed teams responsible for advancing Google's visual search technologies and was the engineering manager for Google Goggles.[11][12][13][14] The concept of adversarial patterns originated in his group when he tasked Christian Szegedy with a project to modify the pixel inputs of a deep neural network to lower the activity of select output nodes.[15] The motivation was to use this technique for object localization which did not work out. But the idea gave rise to the fields of adversarial learning and DeepDream art. In 2013 his optical character recognition team won the ICDAR Robust Reading Competition by a wide margin[16] and in 2014 the object recognition team won the ImageNet challenge.[17]

Neven was a co-founder of the Google Glass project. His team completed the first prototype, codenamed Ant, in 2011.

In 2006 Neven started to explore the application of quantum computing to hard combinatorial problems arising in machine learning. In collaboration with D-Wave Systems he developed the first image recognition system based on quantum algorithms. It was demonstrated at SuperComputing07.[18] At NIPS 2009 his team demonstrated the first binary classifier trained on a quantum processor.[19][20][21]

In 2012 together with Pete Worden at NASA Ames he founded the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2014 he invited John Martinis and his group at UC Santa Barbara to join the lab to start a fabrication facility for superconducting quantum processors. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence team performed the first experimental demonstration of a scalable simulation of a molecule.[22] In 2016 the team formulated an experiment to demonstrate quantum supremacy.[23]

Based on the observation that quantum computers are gaining computational power at a doubly exponential rate called "Neven's law", Neven suggested that quantum supremacy could occur in 2019.[24] Quantum supremacy was declared by Google in October 2019.[25] Citing Neven: "It’s not one company versus another, but rather, humankind versus nature — or humankind with nature."[26]