Qian Lin is teaching computers to "see"

The past decade has seen the democratization of photography through the smartphone revolution, with more pictures taken every two minutes than were taken throughout the entirety of the 1800s, according to some estimates. In fact, InfoTrends predicts more than a trillion images will be taken this year alone. "Cameras generate so much data, and a lot of times you need immediate action and analysis from this data," she says. "This research area is one that I'm very passionate about and its increasingly becoming more important to HP." Lin and her team were the creators of Pixel Intelligence, a powerful portfolio of computer vision algorithms that helps print service providers make sense of visual data. The algorithms can find faces within an image or find the same face in multiple images with great accuracy.