No  Talk. All Action!

It’s my 3rd time to play Startup Weekend. The topic was about AI. Since the summer, I have been playing around with the machine learning course (taught by Andrew Ng) on Coursera. So I am really eager to see what I learned is correct and applicable to commercial use. For me, it is nonsense to spend years of research without any financial return.

The topic I pitched: Face.ai – Reveal Personality Instantly

Originally I failed at the pitching session to find enough supporters. There are more than 30 teams to make a 1-minute pitch on the stage. To be honest, I am not good at impressing audience within a short time.

Fortunately, Startup Weekend should have improved the rules over the years. it also allows teams to continue the project if they failed at the pitching session. But they need to find at least 2 members to support the project.

The Team

I am lucky enough to find other 4 members to continue in a short time. That’s the first part of the story. My team consists of 2 tech, 1 design, 2 biz guys. I would say that’s a good mix. We’ve been working very hard for the 54 hours. Hacking is always fun for geeks.

Team members (from left to right):

Lok Yeung
Issac Chan
Bond Sze
Benny Chan
YungMie Chin

My idea is to apply machine learning (in particular Computer Vision) to Chinese face reading philosophy to build the initial prediction model. When you upload an image, you can briefly tell the personality of a person. We’ve finished a simple landing page for demonstrating the idea in a short time.

Final Pitch Session

The result

We didn’t enter the top 3 places. But I think I’ve learned a lot in the process. It did validate how other people thought about the idea. Western people are very shocked about face telling brief personality. They have no idea in Chinese face reading theory at all. I think they don’t have any idea in this area. From our research, we found that there was a field called “Physiognomy” but the study was discontinued in ancient time, maybe the middle age.

I will continue my study on computer vision. Besides personality, health may be revealed on the face. Health may be more valuable than personality in terms of commercial value. It may help more people to discover hidden diseases. But both of them are technically challenging.

Entrepreneurship is always about executing what you believe.

— It’s one of the most important things I learned in my endless startup journey.