Uljan Sharka, a young entrepreneur of Albanian origin, is CEO and founder of iGenius. Its start-up, with headquarters in Milan, has already raised seven million dollars in funding, initiated collaborations with Google and Facebook and opened offices in the most important hubs worldwide for Artificial Intelligence. After London and San Francisco, last year the company came to Sierre, Switzerland. “The opening of a research center in Switzerland was a milestone for us. Working with Idiap and HES-SO Valais-Wallis we were able to upgrade our first product, crystal, a virtual advisor for digital data”, said Sharka. crystal allows to analyze, interpret and make use of complex data using natural language. It has already been adopted by over 20,000 companies in 20 countries, and its customer base is constantly growing. In the coming months, over 30 new jobs are expected to be created between Italy and Switzerland. The Sierre office is currently looking for Machine Learning engineers, mobile developers and DevOps engineers. “We are confident that iGenius will benefit from the local talent pool”, said Mr. Christophe Darbellay, State Councilor in charge of the Department of Economy and Education for the State of Valais.
iGenius’ new office is located at Techno-Pôle, Switzerland’s leading center for information and communication technology. Created in 1989, it hosts about 70 companies and three research institutes of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Information Systems, Tourism, Entrepreneurship and Management) as well as the Icare Institute, for a total of around 600 employees. The presence of complementary actors under one roof stimulates the creativity and favors the emergence of innovative solutions. In 2017, the research institutes based at Techno-Pôle worked on more than 700 industrial projects.
Among the most active independent research institutions in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Idiap specializes in multimedia information management and human-computer interaction. Around 100 researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and PhD students work on biometric person recognition, perceptual and cognitive systems, natural language processing, and large-scale machine learning. Idiap works in close cooperation with DARPA, the agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies. One of the ongoing projects focuses on the automated assessment of the integrity of an image or video. On 29 August 2018, Idiap organizes an INNOVATION DAY, a unique opportunity to learn more about activities in the buzzing sector of Artificial Intelligence by meeting all Idiap researchers in person.
