This AI Company Can Tell You What and Who Appears in Your Videos

If you're a brand advertiser at a car company or a cereal maker, you may want to know when your product appears, unscripted, in hundreds of hours of TV shows or online videos. How to track that without watching all of it? An artificial intelligence startup has the answer. Matroid, founded by Stanford University adjunct professor Reza Zadeh, can scan video for all sorts of things like when President Donald Trump appears, or how often a man holding a gun is recorded. Users can easily write a filter--Matroid calls them detectors--of their own to find particular people or objects, or they can pick from a library of pre-programmed filters designed by the startup.