ABBYY Ideas Contest - how to win a new iPhone

Hello. My name is Igor Akimov, I am the head of ABBYY mobile products. Probably, many people know ABBYY from the best dictionaries of Lingvo and the assistant of any student of FineReader , but besides this we are still doing a lot of interesting things in the field of intellectual information processing and linguistics. For 28 years, we have accumulated a huge baggage in the field of machine learning and neural networks, and there are so many new projects and ideas that it seems we need help :) Therefore, we invite you to take part in the competition. We are looking for ideas on the use of new technologies in mobile development, which will be close to a large number of people. And we called the competition boldly - mABBYYlity (here both ABBYY, and mobility, and ability - ability). In short, everything is basic here - mobility.abbyy.com . And in the article for details.

Why ideas?

So, a competition of ideas from ABBYY. There is an opinion that the realization of an idea, especially in a startup, is much more important than brilliant insight. But the idea from the point of view of human knowledge is a real act of creation, the transfer to the world of things of something absolutely new. It causes respect! We understand that we can solve many interesting problems of education and business, but which of them are really the most interesting and useful? You, standing on the very edge of this process, know much more about it than our customers and employees. Therefore, we appreciate your opinion on how to make the world a better place with the help of ABBYY technologies.

We understand that just to take and invent or combine something new is difficult, but because there is the rest of September to think. Applications are accepted until September 30, and let's say about the results rather quickly - on October 7 (yes, our team will sleep in the office this week). Well, plus it will be possible to implement the idea on the hackathon, which we will announce a little later.

Why participate at all?

When I studied at the university on the 3rd year, I remember, I made a free schedule sending for students via SMS (GMS modem and a small program with a base), because the server APIs for this were simply frustrating and expensive. I am sure that you also see cool large-scale opportunities every day, perhaps you are using our products and I am sure that you often think how cool it would be if now ABBYY was mentioned ... Now there is such an opportunity!
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And of course, we are not going to deny the most creative and prizes. The main joy is the newest iPhone Edition, which has not even been presented yet (we will buy for any money and give it to you).

Directions of ideas

So, let's go over the areas that we do ourselves and see great potential:

Bots, services in social networks and messengers

We understand that despite the limited interfaces and narrow scenarios, such services can be very convenient. If you know how best to use our or future technologies in instant messengers - write .

Augmented Reality in Mobile Devices

With iOS 11, practically on millions of devices, the possibilities of easy-to-develop and quite high-quality augmented reality will be opened with the help of ARKit, and we will certainly add an interesting piece to our mobile applications (follow the announcements), and just a week ago Google responded with ARCode and became it is clear that this is serious and for a long time. Augmented reality in business can still be weakly associated with any utility (except for 3d-modeling and architecture), but I am sure that there are useful scenarios.

Text processing, document classification, search

Oh, you can tell a lot of things. First of all, there are ABBYY intellectual technologies, which allow to search for interconnections and identify entities in semi-structured texts. Secondly, neural networks further improve work results and make it easier to obtain good data. Here it is desirable to use everything that converts well in CoreML - Caffe, TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn 0.18, XGBoost 0.6, LIBSVM 3.22.

Recognition and processing of images and video

This is alpha and omega ABBYY. In recognition, we have already eaten so many dogs that it seems there is nothing to surprise, but no :) With each new scientific article and patent of our engineers, I understand that there is still room for development. The most important announcement of the last time is Real-Time Recognition - recognition in real time, and therefore quickly, and qualitatively, and from the video stream. There are many scenarios here: from scanning documents and passes to translating text in an unfamiliar country in augmented reality.

Improving, complement, filtering photos

In order for the recognition quality to grow and the document, even in the wildest shooting conditions, looked as if exported from a newly freshly printed Word, you need to do a lot of useful things with a photo: from selecting the right filter to determining where the picture is in the photo, and where our wonderful text. And of course the search from several photos is the coolest for recognition, or, for example, the search for passport photos in your feed is also an urgent task that we solve every day. And your ideas will also be in place.

Recognition and processing of images in the browser

Browsers are developing at such a pace that it seems that “soon there will be no ballet, no theater, one continuous television” - everyone will work in browsers. And here you can think about the technology WebAssembly, as well as all the cool JavaScript-libraries that are engaged in recognition and image processing.

Recognition in cameras of various devices

The scanner in the phone does not surprise anyone (there is FineScanner ), but different drones, robots, road cameras and cars are another beast. A flying drone over a cuckoo's nest, for example, can be considered cuckoo, and also (which is more useful) - to recognize the numbers of the cars.

Information Exchange Technologies

Having received the information in one place it is not always possible to quickly transfer it to the right place. Attempts to invent a wheel have been going on here a very long time ago. You can recall the same data transfer on mobile phones. First, on the infrared port (oh, I still remember how I poured ringtones in Siemens S35i and Samsung already with 16 tools!), Then via Bluetooth, then Wi-Fi Direct, NFC, AirDrop, clouds, and so on and so forth. But there is still no happiness. The same with a bunch of mobile phones with a desktop. Dozens of cool technologies, but it comes with a creak ... But together with you we will win!

Security Enhancement Technologies

We work a lot with security and security companies. Our technologies for recognizing and determining sensitive information are used in the decisions of several information security companies known to you, but the work here is still a car and a small truck.

Digital enterprise productivity boost

This is generally what we do around the clock and for many, many years. From digitizing tons of paper and turning it into knowledge to digitalization of entire industries, for example, banks (almost all of the top in Russia use our solutions). And for personal productivity, we have mobile solutions that allow you to do typical tasks with text, business cards, documents faster and more mobile. And if something can be done better or even differently - do not keep in yourself.

Cloud technologies and services

For mobile phones, the clouds are the only way to manipulate huge amounts of data and straighten, for example, the curved pages of the book, as BookScanner does. You can either come up with such a service, or “tie” a good API to our current technologies. Different ideas and combinations of a million.

How and who evaluates?

We tried not to overload the application, but try to choose the most viable things. That is why criteria 4:

1. Relevance (the problem is not fully resolved, and millions of money are spent on crutch solutions);
2. Novelty and originality (competitors are still sleeping);
3. Technical (technological) feasibility (can be done at the level of the prototype for a couple of days - great!);
4. Assessment of market potential (millions of people face every day).

In the expert jury of the competition, we tried to select people who would appreciate the ideas from different sides. Their total 6:

• ABBYY vice-president of product marketing, Sergey Pavlov ;
• ABBYY Group Product Director Andrey Isaev ;
• Your humble servant - Igor Akimov , Head of ABBYY Mobile Products;
• IDIA investment portfolio manager Sergei Negodyaev ;
• Editor-in-Chief of Lifestyle Technology Technology Resource TechFusion.ru Marina Efendiyeva ;
• Director for Development and International Relations of Fiztekhpark Ekaterina Eliseeva .

Look like that's it. If there are any questions - write, I will answer in the comments.
Enter the VK , Facebook and Telegram contest groups.

Well, be sure to tell us about your idea here mobility.abbyy.com .