Chen-Ping Yu (Phiar) on the Future of AR Navigation and Experience at YC

The Guest

Chen-Ping Yu is the Founder and CEO at Phiar, an early-stage startup seeking to revolutionize how people navigate and experience the world, through cutting-edge computer vision AI technology. 

Phiar is creating an augmented reality navigation platform for driving, to enhance driving safety, facilitate more intuitive wayfinding, and connect drivers with their surrounding environments.

Prior to Phiar, Chen-Ping was on a path to become a professor focused on computer vision. After getting his masters at Penn State and his Ph.D. at Stony Brook, he was working on his post-doctoral research at Harvard. There he was investigating and developing neuro-inspired deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for modeling human visual information processing for image and object classification. 

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Chen-Ping Yu

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Phiar

The Conversation

In this conversation, we dig into the origins of the company as well as their approach to ultra low-power computer vision that can run efficiently on smartphones in real time.

Chin-Ping shares his decision to pursue and attend Y Combinator, and his most harrowing moment while he was there. We talk about the challenges of augmenting the world through a mobile phone and how that applies to Phiar’s initial mobile AR product. We go on to discuss concerns around driver distraction and how navigation serves as the gateway to a broad and pervasive AR platform technology.