Monday, March 10, 2008

Women to Watch

Sadiye Guler: Conviction in a changing road ahead

By Jay Rizoli

Sadiye Guler is a woman of vision. (And while that's probably a quality shared by all the Women to Watch honorees, in her case it's a bit more literal.)

Guler, a 20-year veteran of video technology, is the founder, president and CEO of intuVision Inc., a developer of video content extraction technologies that turn video into analyzable, searchable data for security, surveillance and investigation purposes. In short, it's a technology that's a long way from your home movies.

Growing up in Ankara, Turkey, Guler wanted to be an architect but steered toward engineering in high school. "I'm very visual. I like drawing, and in my mind (architecture) was the closest thing to math and art," she says. "I took courses (in high school) that led me toward electrical engineering. And in graduate school I was inclined more toward computer engineering. I guess that visual inclination took me more toward video."

Guler was working on her Ph.D. at Middle East Technical University when she was invited to MIT as a visiting scientist, where she worked on using images to detect fault zones, and later finished her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She continued working on image processing at a small, now-defunct startup in New Hampshire. "That's where I got the startup bug. It was a fun, informal environment, a place where you could bring ideas to conclusion."

Her next step came at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, where Guler was manager and chief scientist of the Advanced Video Technology group and helped establish intelligent video technology as an emerging business area. But after eight years, she left to pursue a longtime goal in founding intuVision.

"From that small company that I once worked at, I had this idea," she said. "A lot of people are afraid to go out on their own, but I'm not one of them. And it seemed like the logical thing to do even though they told me I was crazy."

"They" probably don't think that now. The 2-year-old intuVision has released event-detection and video-analysis products and sold some licenses, Guler says, and has a strong sense of a future that keeps evolving.

"There are many open problems involving video content, and the technology is advancing day to day so it's not like all problems are solved," she said. "We're working on things today while working toward the technology of tomorrow. We need more research and more answers. We can't just release a product and sit here and collect royalties."

Guler lives not far from intuVision's Woburn headquarters with her husband and two children and says intuVision represents the crown jewel of her career so far. But like the technology in an increasingly security-conscious world, that could change.

"I'd say (my top achievement) starting intuVision because I really feel passionately about the technology and what we're able to offer," she said. "If you asked me a few years back it would be getting my Ph.D., but it's funny how perspectives change."