Illium
Dr. Gary Bradski

Dr. Gary Bradski

Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Gary Bradski has invested a lifetime advancing the fields of AI and Computer Vision. He is founder & Chairman of OpenCV.org (400M downloads in 2023), a consulting faculty member at Stanford CS, founder & member of the vision team for Stanley (the robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge, now in the Smithsonian Museum in D.C.). Gary has been on the founding team for 5 startups and the founder of a nonprofit: OpenCV.org. He serves on several boards and adviserships. Gary is an active angel investor; his most recent exit was Lambda Labs’ 2024 2nd market in $1.5B C round; Gary was the first investor. In 2014 Gary won the prestigious IEEE PAMI prize for contributions to the field of computer vision and won in 2021 the ICCV Helmholtz Prize Test of Time Award for his “ORB” paper. Gary Bradski is an internationally recognized leader and visionary in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and robotic perception with 76 publications and 138 Issued Patents. He founded and still runs OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision and machine learning library) and its parent organization, the Open Source Vision Foundation (OSVF). OpenCV is the leading computer vision library used around the world with 400M downloads in 2023. In 2014, he won the IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham prize for contributions to the field of computer vision for OpenCV. He co-wrote the textbook “Learning OpenCV” in 2008 which became the best-selling book in computer vision and machine learning for 3 years. An update of this popular textbook, Learning OpenCV 3 was published in 2016. Gary founded the computer vision team of Stanley working with Professor Sebastian Thrun. Stanley won the $2M DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous robot race across the desert. This victory began the worldwide effort to develop autonomous cars, and Stanley is now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Gary was consulting Professor at Stanford where he taught classes, mentored research and cofounded the Stanford AI Robotics Project (STAIR) at Stanford with Professor Andrew Ng, Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Kohler, and others which led indirectly to ROS (the Robot Operating System), Willow Garage and the PR2 (personal robot # 2 which was able to plug itself in and recharge covering 26 miles of indoor navigation). Gary is deeply involved in Silicon Valley startups starting with a chief programmer role at the first computerized EEG company called “Neural Science” which sold to a medical group. He went on to found his own consulting company, Adept Computer Consulting, where he worked on manufacturing automation projects. Gary was later the 1st employee at VideoSurf, building the first web video search engine, which was later bought by Microsoft in 2011 and is now part of BING. From there he joined the robotics startup/incubator called Willow Garage from which he later spun-out Industrial Perception Inc (IPI), a sensor-driven robotics logistic company. IPI was sold to Google in 2013. He went on to found the Silicon Valley office of Magic Leap corporation building the computer vision, system software, and artificial intelligence (deep learning) teams to 150 employees. He served as CTO/CSO of Arriay.com, sold to Matterport in 2019. He was then Senior Fellow at Gauss Surgical which sold to Stryker Surgical in 2021. He also helped found an AI contracting group, OpenCV.ai and finally helped in the founding of Farm-ng making agricultural robotics where he spent 18 months. Farm-ng is ongoing. Gary has been an investor, board member, and advisor to two dozen other startups. He served as an Entrepreneur in Residence with IDG Capital Group in 2016.