GrokStyle --- "visual understanding for interior design" --- co-founded by graduating CS PhD student Sean Bell and Kavita Bala, won the 2016 Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge at the annual LDV Vision Summit. Their mission: "Given any photo, we want to tell you what products are in it, and where you can buy them. We want to help customers and retailers connect with designers, by searching for how others have used and combined furniture and decor products. The world is full of beautiful design -- we want to help you find it."
In an May interview, Bell describes the development of the company as follows: "We presented a research paper at SIGGRAPH 2015 about our ideas from last year. It has taken us a year to flesh out the work, develop it from a research prototype to a product prototype. But there is still a lot to do. I am graduating in a few months, and Prof. Kavita Bala is joining full time on sabbatical. We plan to hit the ground running this summer with our engineer Kathleen Tuite, and two interns we are taking on. As technologists, we are looking to partner with business people to take the lead on evaluating which markets and customers can benefit the most from our technology. Starting in the fall, we plan on fundraising to help scale up our technical infrastructure."
Serge Belongie was one of the event organizers (he recused himself from any decisions involving Cornell teams).
