Lou Kratz

Lou Kratz is the Lead Research Engineer at Curalate. He received his PhD in computer vision from Drexel University in 2012, and then got hit by the start-up bug in the best way. He enjoys making cool stuff using computer vision and machine learning when he's not cooking, watching Jeopardy, or playing bocce. He lives in Philadelphia which he used as a primary subject for his instagram account, at least until his daughter was born.

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Posts by Lou Kratz

• Uploading EC2 Logs to S3 on Shutdown

  If you’ve ever used an auto scaling group (ASG) on AWS, you’ve probably had an EC2 instance fail and get removed from the ASG. While great for redundancy (the ASG launches a new instance to start handling requests), it makes debugging the failure difficult since the ASG terminates the bad instance, erasing any evidence of what went wrong. Below, I present a script that will upload relevant files to S3 after an instance is triggered to shutdown but before it terminates.

  Read More Sep 4, 2018

• How Curalate uses MXNet on AWS for Deep Learning Magic

  At Curalate, we use state of the art deep learning and computer vision to add a layer of magic to our products. Intelligent Product Tagging, for example, identifies our clients' products in user-generated photos. Being a startup, we need to build these deep learning and computer vision systems the same way we do the rest of our products: quickly. Read More Aug 1, 2018

• R&D At Curalate: A Case Study of Deep Metric Embedding

  At Curalate, we make social sell for hundreds of the world’s largest brands and retailers. Our Fanreel product is a good example of this; it empowers brands to collect, curate, and publish social user-generated photos to their e-commerce site. A vital step in this pipeline is connecting the user generated content (UGC) to the product on our client’s web site. Automating this process requires cutting edge computer vision techniques whose implementation details are not always clear, especially for production use cases. In this post, I review how we leveraged Curalate’s R&D principles to build a visual search engine that identifies which of our clients’ products are in user generated photos. The resulting system allows our clients to quickly connect user generated content to their e-comm site, enabling the UGC to generate revenue immediately upon distribution.

  Read More Feb 1, 2018

• Content Based Intelligent Cropping

  Square pegs don’t fit in round holes, but what if you have power tools?

  Read More Apr 13, 2017

• Brewing EmojiNet

  Emojis, the tiny pictographs in our phone’s keyboard, have become a important form of communication. Even Oxford Dictionary named 😂 the word of the year for 2015. Though maybe not worth a thousand words, each emoji evokes a much richer response for the reader than boring old text. This makes sense: people communicate visually.

  Read More Jan 20, 2016