Lauren Barghout Joins Demizine Technologies

In a recent release, Demizine Technologies, a Vancouver-based maker of smart AI-powered water appliances, has announced the appointment of Dr. Lauren Barghout to head the company's Artificial Intelligence unit, along with the hiring of Cmosvision.

Demizine develops closed loop, off-grid, decentralized portable water and wastewater systems that are designed to eliminate the sole reliance on existing municipal infrastructure.

“I have known Lauren for many years and in the past, she has been instrumental to many important AI and vision science projects,” said Jonathan Kitzen, CEO, Demizine. “Having her on our team gives us extra insight into deep learning and pathogen identification.” Kitzen and Barghout had been working on the implementation of Convolutional Neural Nets (CNN) prior to their interests being piqued by this new application of AI.

Cmosvision is a specialized camera hardware company based out of Shafthousen, Switzerland that has been tapped to co-develop the visual systems required for Barghout's work.

Among the company's accomplishments is the design of two Earth orbiting camera systems. “We have a long history of developing optical measuring apparatuses, and for this implementation, we think we can achieve a low cost system that will create some real opportunities for discovery and open up new untapped markets,” said George Israel, CEO, Cmosvision.

Barghout is a graduate of UC Berkeley and a highly regarded vision scientist. The company hopes to use her skill set to develop a new portable water-testing unit for incorporation in the company's existing water recycling appliance. “Lauren has the ability and track record to take the basic suite of water sensors we already have and add into it high quality optical recognition systems and AI that take the product to an entirely new level,” said Kitzen.

“I get dozens of requests from companies to help them build out products and services, but this work here, for Demizine, is important to me because it impacts lives. For me, work that has higher purpose and helps people is extremely important,” said Barghout. “It's a challenge, but all of AI can be challenging depending on the level of fidelity you want to achieve!”