GrokStyle is a provider of vision-based AI solutions for retail that recently announced that it has been selected by IKEA to power visual search for the globally recognized retailer’s IKEA Place augmented reality app. With this integration, the AR experience has been enhanced so that users can now easily take a picture to search for a product and visualize it in their home.

GrokStyle has developed award-winning visual search technology to meet the specific needs of retailers. The core technology is based on groundbreaking research conducted by the founders at Cornell University, which is frequently cited by followers in the field of visual search and supported by two National Science Foundation Grants. The company was selected as one of the 100 most promising AI companies in the world in 2017 by CB Insights and won the 2016 LDV Vision Summit Entrepreneurial Challenge.

Guest Info

Kavita Bala is a Professor in the Computer Science Department and Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. She co-founded GrokStyle, and serves as Chief Scientist (2015--), and is a faculty Fellow with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

Bala specializes in computer graphics and computer vision, leading research in recognition and visual search using deep learning; material modeling and acquisition; realistic, physically-based rendering; and material and lighting perception.

Bala's work on scalable rendering, Lightcuts, is the core production rendering engine in Autodesk's cloud renderer; and her instance recognition research is the core technology of GrokStyle's visual search engine. Her work on 3D Mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York.