Our speaker this month was Dr Ilse Daly who told us about her journey from vision scientist to start-up founder at her company
Blackdog Biomechanics.
I’ve had a varied academic career, going from a Physics
undergraduate to an Ecology of Vision PhD where I specialised in
tracking and understanding the weird and wonderful eyes of the mantis
shrimp. Mantis shrimp have 12 distinct colour receptors (we have 3), can
see 2 types of polarized light (we see none) and can move their eyes
independently in three rotational planes. Building a bespoke mantis
shrimp eye tracker was an *“interesting” task, which put me on the
path to becoming a software developer. However, there’s a pretty big
gulf between being a true software developer and someone who just writes
MATLAB code to track shrimp eyes!*
As my academic career went on, I realised two things 1) academia
wasn’t really for me and 2) the computer vision techniques I’d been
learning could be used for a lot of useful stuff. So I started tinkering
on the side - in the evenings and at weekends and I eventually fell
into app development, which in turn led to me to starting my own
business; BLACKDOG biomechanics.
Sounds easy right: have an idea, write the app, sell the app…
Turns out that’s not entirely how it works, as I’ll show in this talk.