IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2018 - 95

Professional Development

Entrepreneurs in
Consumer Electronics
By Tom Wilson

his article is the first in a series of
interviews with technology entrepreneurs who have crossed the
chasm from academia to run successful businesses. What were their biggest fears, challenges, and victories? Is an
academic mind set a help or a hindrance
in the business world, and how well does
it prepare entrepreneurs to deal with
ambiguity? International tech entrepreneurs share their stories and what they
have learned along the way, from inception of "the idea," raising funding from
poker-faced investors, building a team and
a company culture, and interacting with
commitment-shy clients and commercial
partners. Many academics and young
engineers imagine that a new technology
will be able to stand on its own merits in
the business world; those who have made
the journey often tell a different story. In
this column, we feature an interview with
the founders of IRYStec Software Inc.,
Tara Akhavan and Afsoon Soudi.

Austria. Afsoon Soudi earned her Ph.D.
degree in physics from Washington State
University, Pullman, and previously led
multiple research groups.
Wilson: What is your product?
IRYStec Software, Inc.: We developed a suite of embedded software image processing technologies collectively
named the Perceptual Display Platform
(PDP). The PDP is a kind of equalizer
that optimally adjusts the color and luminance of content displayed on devices
such as smartphones or automobile dashboard clusters.
Wilson: Why is this necessary and
what were the shortcomings of the existing solutions?
IRYStec Software, Inc.: Display settings could already, to some extent, be
modified by the user to suit their preferences. For example, the brightness may be
increased to see photos on the screen in

the sunshine or decreased for reading in
bed, but this is far too simplistic. Take the
fact that as an ambient illumination
increases, the perceivable black level rises;
darker tones are harder to see, so colors
become desaturated and the overall contrast decreases. Besides that, each of us
has a unique visual system; we see stuff
differently according to age, sex, and ethnicity [1]-[3]. So, the human perceptual
system is far more nuanced, and we felt
this was not being addressed. Also, the
ambient light can change in hue, which
affects the perception of colors on a screen
in that environment, and a single brightness setting cannot compensate for this.
Wilson: Why had no one addressed
this previously?
IRYStec Software, Inc.: We believe it
is because physiologists and psychologists
have only, in the past 20 years, gained a
better understanding of how the human

Tom Wilson: First, tell us about IRYStec.
IRYStec Software, Inc.: IRYStec,
based in Montréal, Canada, was founded
in 2016 by two academics after they
raised money from investors to commercialize a prototype they developed.
Wilson: What are the founders'
backgrounds?
IRYStec Software, Inc.: Tara Akhavan earned her Ph.D. degree in image
processing and computer vision from
the Vienna University of Technology,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2017.2776467
Date of publication: 13 June 2018

The IRYStec team in Montréal, Canada. The management team is in the foreground: (from
left) founders Afsoon Soudi and Tara Akhavan with Chief Executive Officer Simon Morris.

july 2018

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

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