Interview with Mingqiang Lee, Founder and CEO, Tuputech

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to found an AI image recognition company?
For all we know, today we have stepped into an era of picture-reading. Most of the information is conveyed through pictures and videos. So the demand for image recognition, image analysis, and image understanding are growing much stronger than ever before. Some companies generally don’t have any AI engineering and technical capabilities, but they do have a strong demand for dealing with image data. Therefore, the prospect of image recognition is more than promising.

MTS: How does Tuputech’s Image recognition API work?
Firstly, the image data from the customer’s service is transferred to our API through cloud. We take this data and use our image recognition system to recognize the image. The output result will be returned to the customer through the cloud. Under normal circumstances, the whole procedure only takes 1 second and the system can deal with 50 images at a time.

MTS: How does Tuputech’s offering integrate with various DMPs/CMS?
The output results of image recognition involves scoring the image, whether the image is acceptable and whether it needs to be reviewed. Most of our customers will group the images based on the results we provide, and then do relative processing on their auditing platforms. For example, the pornographic content auditing platforms will delete the pornographic images and manually recheck the suspect images. Usually, images suspected of being pornographic account for less than 5%, which means that customers only have to recheck 5% of all the data. For live-broadcasting platforms, they will send the illegal-suspected items to a specific auditing position and the auditors can deal with those images. In this way, the efficiency of auditing can be improved.

MTS: Which sectors do Tuputech’s image recognition services cater to?
Tuputech excels in recognizing offensive images and videos, including pornography, violence, terrorism and spam. We can train our models based on the different requirements of our customers. In other words, we can solve the identification problems for people with different skin colors. Additionally, our image recognition system can not only identify the normal pornography but also child pornography.

MTS: How would you commercialize AI in a step-by step manner at Tuputech?
AI commercialization is a step-by-step process, instead of a one-stop process. Due to the specialty of AI technology, it can achieve a 70%-good model very quickly, but it is difficult to  improve the model to its 100% perfection. TupuTech provides costumers with quality-assured services while preserving the basic image-recognition. We are trying to enhance our accuracy, perfecting the whole recognition loop.

MTS: Would you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
Our targeted customer types include social media and websites for live-broadcasting, short videos and pictures sharing, etc. Except for adult sites, most of the websites do not allow pornographic content. What’s more, video-socializing websites are extremely popular today and because of their privacy, problems in management and supervision could happen from time to time. Tuputech’s service can be accessed via API as well as SDK. So far, SDK for pornography recognition is available and can be integrated in apps to moderate videros in real-time. The SDK can be embedded in the app and could supervise video conversations in real time. As for social video apps, we can also identify whether the user is juvenile or not, and prevent them from using this type of app.

MTS: As a business leader of an AI-centric firm, how do you see current AI systems evolving over the next five years?
AI will surely overturn different industries and re-deploy social resources. The influence of AI is unintended and at the same time all-round. From our country’s status, transformation of cities and the development of companies, to personal career, none of these is unaffected by AI. The whole world will change under the impact of AI and we all will face a new round of opportunities and challenges.

MTS: Thank you Mingqiang! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.