Dr. Deepak Sekar is an inventor and entrepreneur. Over the last decade, he has been granted 192 patents, making him one of the more prolific inventors in the world today.
You may know him from his role as Founder and CEO of Chowbotics, which built the world's first fresh food-making robot named “Sally.” Sally now operates in over 250 locations worldwide. Under Sekar’s leadership, Chowbotics was named among the food trends of 2019 by The New York Times and listed as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Fast Company. Chowbotics was acquired by DoorDash in 2020.
Around that time, Sekar watched his daughters grapple with pandemic-induced online classes and felt something should be done about it. So, he co-founded Prof Jim to help transform e-learning.
When he’s not in Silicon Valley coercing his family to test his latest brainchild, he’s most likely climbing some distant mountain in a quest to push his limits (or at least, get out of the house!). He holds a B. Tech. from IIT Madras, and a M. S. and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Dr. Deepak Sekar is an inventor and entrepreneur. Over the last decade, he has been granted 192 patents, making him one of the more prolific inventors in the world today.
You may know him from his role as Founder and CEO of Chowbotics, which built the world's first fresh food-making robot named “Sally.” Sally now operates in over 250 locations worldwide. Under Sekar’s leadership, Chowbotics was named among the food trends of 2019 by The New York Times and listed as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Fast Company. Chowbotics was acquired by DoorDash in 2020.
Around that time, Sekar watched his daughters grapple with pandemic-induced online classes and felt something should be done about it. So, he co-founded Prof Jim to help transform e-learning.
When he’s not in Silicon Valley coercing his family to test his latest brainchild, he’s most likely climbing some distant mountain in a quest to push his limits (or at least, get out of the house!). He holds a B. Tech. from IIT Madras, and a M. S. and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Dr. Deepak Sekar, co founder and CEO of Professor Jim is an inventor and entrepreneur. Over the last decade, he's been granted more than 200 patents, making him one of the most prolific inventors in the world today. He was also the founder and CEO of Chow biotics, which built the world's first fresh food making robot. Chow biotics was named one of the world's most innovative companies by Fast Company and was acquired by DoorDash in 2020. When he's not coercing his family to test his latest invention, he's likely climbing a distant mountain. Professor gym is a ed tech startup designed to transform lessons into experiences, empowering publishers, educators and creators to transform content into video based learning experiences. Dr. Deepak Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Thank you, Alex, I'm glad to be here.
Alexander Sarlin:I'm excited to have you here. So you have a fascinating background coming into the EdTech field, I have to just ask from the 10,000 foot view, give our listeners an overview of your history and how you found yourself doing a really innovative AI based ed tech company.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:So I'm a mentor by background, I've been an inventor on more than 200 issued patents. And a dozen of them, I used every iPhone. So a bunch of your listeners are probably using my patterns on a daily basis. This is my second company, Professor Jim is my second company. With my first company, I got tired of cooking my food at home. And I started building a robot which made my own food. And that led to my first company. It's called chatbot X. And it was acquired by DoorDash, a year and a half back or two years back then. And after that I started Professor Jim and Professor Jim started largely because I saw my kids go through online learning during COVID. And it wasn't a great experience. And I figured, you know, Hey, we should do something to make it better. And that's how I got involved with edtech. I have a PhD in Engineering, and so pretty familiar with education. I love teaching. So even though I might not have worked in tech till a couple of years back, I'm pretty familiar with the education space after spending a whole lot of years in school.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah. And, you know, one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that it brought a lot of attention to education and to Ed Tech, and it brought world class minds into the EdTech field. And I think you are a prime example of that. 200 patents, so many inventions, you are Georgia Tech, you have so much knowledge in this field. And now you're applying it to this problem that all of us in edtech are really interested in how to teach at scale, and how to make really amazing courses. So tell us a little bit about what Professor Jim does.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, so our mission is to convert lessons into experiences. And we believe AI helps us do that. So our first product is something which I believe can change the world of textbooks. There's a lot of studies which indicate Gen Z refers to learn through videos compared to reading textbooks. In fact, Pearson did a study in 2018, before even the pandemic, where they found Gen Z folks were more comfortable learning through video than reading textbooks. And after the pandemic, things have just accelerated. So in this sort of environment, what we do becomes kind of irrelevant what we do is we scan textbooks if someone gives a textbook to us and E textbook form or PDF form, we scan it and Rei automatically converts it into a teaching video, a video course and so it helps us appeal to Gen Z with a lot of the content which has existed already.
Alexander Sarlin:And this video course both has slides that are generated automatically and eight automatic AI generated instructor who is actually delivering the content with AI generated voice. Tell us about what it feels like to watch a Professor Jim video.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:So Professor Jim media would have like an avatar, teaching the course any avatar and our avatars are pretty realistic. A lot of people have told us they don't realize it's an AI teaching the course it looks like a real person. So we try to Make it photorealistic as much as possible, and the avatar could be an avatar of the teacher teaching a regular course. Or it could be a famous historical personality. Like, we've got people like Aristotle and Jane Austen teaching our course we have Ada Lovelace, who is the first ever programmer, she teaches courses as well. And what we're hearing from people taking these courses is, they often like to learn from these historical celebrities, see them come to life and teach courses. The other option we have is the regular teacher can teach a class, but every one hour or something or every 15 minutes, you can have Ada Lovelace show up and ask questions and make things a bit more interesting. So besides the avatar teachers, our AI automatically creates beautiful looking slides, which look like a designer created them just based on scanning that text and creating the slides. And the video is automatically generated as well. And one key part of our full experiences, we don't want just the instructor talking to the students continuously, because it's one sided flow of information from the teacher to the student. We think good teaching is interactive. So AI automatically comes up with questions that it asks every five or 10 minutes. And so the student feels a break in the monotony. And the student can test his or her knowledge as well. In between,
Alexander Sarlin:it's sort of a one stop shop to take a PDF format or a textbook and turn it into a full video course with slides with assessments with auto generated avatar teacher, which could be historical celebrity, or it actually could be a version of the teacher themselves, which I want to ask you about. And a full set of videos. So it sort of can happen automatically. It is a really mind bending technology. It's very exciting to hear about using generative AI. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned I've seen Sacajawea on the website and Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. But you also can generate custom avatars that look like the instructors of the course, or look like any person. Tell us how that works.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, so the way that works is the instructor takes a bunch of selfies of themselves. And then they send the selfies to us. And once they've sent us the selfies, we create the avatar of the instructor. Normally, we use this tool called Amazon recognition, to see how accurate the avatars are. And many smartphones use Amazon recognition for face ID right now. And typically, we get like a 90% match when we use Amazon recognition for our avatars. So it got the position of the eyes and nose and mouth almost exactly the same as the real person. And so with my avatar, it has a 98 person score, and people say does look like me. And one of the cool things about having my avatar feature class is I don't have to worry about seminars, when I see something, my avatar speaks perfectly, it can speak in whatever accent I wanted to I can speak with an American accent or a British accent, or Indian accent, whatever I choose to use. And I don't have to worry about looking good for camera. In fact, I fed it photos from a year back when I was slimmer. And so I put the best version of me out there. That never hurts. So it's a fun thing, creating your own.
Alexander Sarlin:So one thing we heard from some of the professors at Coursera was that one of the main reasons they wanted to make Coursera courses was to leave a legacy they had maybe had been teaching a course on campus for many years. And they wanted the course to live on beyond them, even if they were retiring. And it seems like there's a really interesting use case for this as well where you can get teachers or professors to be able to take their work and save it for posterity. At their best, they get to choose exactly what age they want to be for that course. Have you gotten any use cases like that?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, we have some teachers and teachers love creating their own avatars and putting that content out there. And it's so easy to update the course as well. And there are some fields like AI, which moves so quickly. And it's hard for professors to keep updating the videos all the time. Here, you just have to edit some text and you have an updated version of the course. So we have gotten interest from a whole lot of professors for creating the avatars and putting that content out there.
Alexander Sarlin:That's a great use case to keep courses up to date as the content changes. And I can imagine a sort of a hybrid course with some live videos and some videos that are very topical, made through API and that are consistently updated. And you can continue to add them I just spitballing here but there's a really interesting use case of keeping the course up to date and continually adding more material without needing to bring Anybody back into a studio or change anything? Yeah. And
Dr. Deepak Sekar:the other thing that does is there are some professors who are celebrities in different universities. Somehow the celebrity professors are the busiest, and they don't have, and in front of cameras for hundreds of hours to record the video courses, here with our staff, they just sent her texts. And you know, they don't have to spend so much time in front of the camera, it just gets done. So I think students can benefit from learning from some of these celebrity professors. And our technology allows people to make that happen. Yeah. It makes
Alexander Sarlin:me think of masterclass where they you know, they bring in these celebrities for one or two days to shoot the whole course. And then they're never going to be able to access them again. And that could be a fun way to get a lot more time from a Steve Martin or, you know, St. Vincent. I know that's not the core use case for Professor Jim. But there are celebrity professors as well, you know, you see Adam Grant on LinkedIn. Everything he writes, gets 10,000 likes, and he has no he writes books all the time. Hey, if he were to do a video course, his time would be very limited. And it's a really interesting use case. So tell us how you got to the name Professor Jim, it seems like it's a tribute to an educator in your life.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:My PhD advisors name is Professor Jim minder. And he played an important role in my career. I remember I first came to the United States when I was age 20, almost a teenager, and this totally new country. And I was not very focused back then. And he kind of took me under his wing and kind of taught me about semiconductors, and how to do research and just how to carry myself in the United States. And he passed away just before I started this company, so kind of named in his honor and memory, and an engineering everyone's had a professor German their life, a teacher or instructor who made their life much better, who made them what they are. And it's really named in honor of that one influential teacher in your life who impacted positively. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:I love that I know the educators who listen to this podcast that will resonate with them the idea they may be that that educator for lots of people, and they have educators in their own life who changed their trajectories. And we want to really give a testament to you mentioned that the avatars that teach the classes can be based on anyone. And it begs, I think, a really interesting question about representation. You could have anybody teach any class, you could potentially have different teachers teaching different types of learners, you mentioned, you know, accents can change, you can change the race or gender of the avatars. Tell us a little bit about some of your thoughts about how people might use avatars in that way.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, that's the search out there, which shows people often like to learn from people who look and sound like that they feel more comfortable. And considering that with our technology, it's possible to have different role model figures, role model teachers, who look different and who sound different. I'll give you one example. So my daughter is 10 years old, and I had her sit through a class on programming. And the class was taught by Ada Lovelace, who is the first person to ever program a computer. And when my daughter sat through that class, she was like, I didn't know that the first ever programmer was a woman. And she told me this quite inspiring. And so we're seeing more and more incidents like that, where people see role model figures and the influence in a certain direction. Similarly, one thing I've had some students say is, we have some Indian American teachers in there as well. And people say, you know, hearing about that background and sitting through that classes, it inspires them to. And so I think it's a pretty interesting thing. We can create avatars of role model figure from different communities and get them mentoring and helping students everywhere. So that's something I'm very, very excited about.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I agree. I know there's been some research and I don't want to miss cited so I will just sort of point people to it. But I think the University of Michigan did some research on their Coursera classes where they taught the same classes with different gender instructors, and showed that having female computer science professors had major impacts on the female learners in the course in terms of their outcomes and their perseverance in the course I don't want to cite numbers because I don't know them off the top of my head. But I think that representation is really important. And what's so interesting about Professor Jim is because everything is AI generated, you can have as many professors as you want change their age, you can change their race, you can you know, as you say role models in their community. seventh graders could learn from a ninth grader, a professor, or a college student could learn from another college student. If that was going to be helpful for them. You could even have learners choose what teacher they would want. Have you seen any use cases like that so far?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, so we've had different learners, they prefer different types of instructors. So it's a pretty controversial topic. Okay, there's one school of thought, which says people need to be comfortable with people who don't look like them and sound like them. So if someone talks with an accent, and the student has a teacher with an accent, you know, it broadens their worldview, to spend time with someone with a different accent who is different, and get used to it versus just sticking to teachers in their own community. So that's one point of view. The other is another point of view and that some people say, hey, if the teachers got the same accent, as the students comfortable when they learn easier, or they feel more comfortable, or they see they see a role model figure, so we don't know what the right answer is there. But I think we have the ability to let students choose or universities choose what they want to do. So we provide that choice, whichever direction the USGS student wants to go, and it's up to them.
Alexander Sarlin:Absolutely. And I think graduate students could have a real field day doing research with a product like this and being able to see different types of learners and different types of teachers and how they interact. It's so interesting, I wanted to ask a little bit about the business of Professor Jim, your primary business model is b2b, where you're offering the ability to create these out of the box video courses from PDFs or textbooks to other companies. Tell us a little bit about this b2b model and who in you know, your sort of profile of your business customers,
Dr. Deepak Sekar:our customers are largely people who are textbook publishers, or people who create online learning at scale. And so for textbook publishers, since Gen Z, there's a lot of surveys, which indicate Gen Z prefers to learn through video. So many textbook companies are trying to figure out how to create videos and go to market with those videos. And we give them the opportunity to take all these hundreds of 1000s of books they have and create courses out of them. So that's one easy use case, where we are already seeing a lot of adoption, people are interested. And it's a new revenue stream for the textbook publisher as well, because if you think about it, Coursera has what 5000 or 10,000 courses, market caps, several billion, I guess more than a billion at least, and sort of a textbook publisher with 100,000 books in the catalog can convert even a fraction of them into video courses. That's a new revenue stream, which they're not tapping into right now. So that's one use case. The other use cases that are people creating video courses at scale, like Udemy, Coursera, Udacity, a whole bunch of others as well. And with all those folks, right now, the teachers often use CO made videos there. And those who made videos, that kind of hard because people don't look at the camera, when they're talking often they don't have good lighting. And we just make the videos a lot more professional with our technology. And it saves a whole lot of cost and headaches for the people creating content. So those are the two main use cases. For us.
Alexander Sarlin:That makes a lot of sense. So people with enormous catalogs of text based learning content that want to go into video courses, or people who need to create many video courses and want to be able to use a tool that accelerates the process and professionalize it and in a lot of different ways. And allows courses to stay up to date, the use case you mentioned earlier, which is very important, especially for technology courses, you know, as the new version of Python comes out, or the new version of React comes out, instead of going back to the drawing board and re shooting the whole course. There are ways to keep it up to date, it makes a lot of sense. So I mean, it's really exciting to see you've mentioned Gen Z, and how they prefer video content a couple of times. And I think that's very poignant. It's interesting to me, it's so the form factor of the videos that Professor Jim makes right now looks like online courses they have sort of it's an avatar with a slide behind them. I'm curious if you see in the future, some different video formats, could they make tic tock videos, you know where I'm going with this? Could you take an article and make it into something that is really designed for tween? How do you think about that kind of thinking?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:We are looking at the Tick Tock format and we're looking at ways to create really short videos for tick tock so we believe there are some simple ways to do that, where we can take snippets of a textbook and convert it into tic tock videos. So that was a very good question whether we
Alexander Sarlin:do I think a little bit about the John and Hank Green who do the Crash Course channel on YouTube. And they make these incredible educational YouTube videos. But if they were to digitize themselves and be able to make 100,000 videos, could be pretty amazing empire of learning. And obviously tick tock is where every kid is right now. Yeah, that's exciting to think about, I'm really looking forward to seeing that kind of format. Let's talk a little bit about open source content. You know, one of the things that you do that's very interesting is you take Wikipedia content, or Open Stax content or any kind of open content. And because that's in the public domain already, you can convert that into video courses, and actually put it in a form factor that's more digestible. How have you been thinking about that process? And what are your plans in the future for
Dr. Deepak Sekar:it? Yeah, that's something we are very interested in. There's a lot of online text content out there. And one of our focus areas right now is taking some of that online text content and converting it into video. And we want to provide it for free to folks, there's so many people out there who could use high quality video content and take video courses. And we believe we can make a big impact on the world make the world a better place by providing, you know, high quality videos for free when the source is an open piece of content. So we are already providing seven courses for free on our website, just go to Prof. tim.com/courses.html. And you can see seven courses we provide for free on Python and AI and all that. And with time, we'll convert more and more open textbooks into videos and provide them for free there as well. So I think that's a pretty important trend, you will see more and more of Yeah, it makes sense.
Alexander Sarlin:And the fact that you can auto generate assessments and quiz questions is also a very powerful tool when it comes to open source content. I have always wondered if there's a business just in taking Wikipedia and making quizzes out of it so that people can actually measure what they're learning and Wikipedia and it feels like you're right on the verge of that already. That's obviously a tiny piece of what you do. But it feels like it's right there you can say oh, you just read the Wikipedia page about Dua Lipa. Now do a quiz to see if you actually know what you learned about Dua Lipa, or whatever you're interested in.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Wouldn't it be exciting if developer asked the questions herself?
Alexander Sarlin:There you go. You just took that to a whole new level? Absolutely. That would be incredible. And the way you think about this video content is so interesting, because you know, we've seen the internet, you know, change everybody's life and mobile phones change everybody's life for the last 20 and 30 years. But the transfer from text content from the internet being primarily text to being pretty much primarily video, especially for younger generations has really been over the last five to 10 years, I think, you know, Facebook, became mostly video, Instagram came in Tik Tok came in YouTube went from, you know, I think when YouTube started, it was like, based on Flickr, and then it's it became, you know, this monolith that, you know, changed the whole world. How do you think about, you know, video as a format? I know you're a father, as well, you're seeing your own kids. Even beyond the research, what do you think is sort of the power of video as a learning tool?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, so I think 71 Like you mentioned, the 90s Internet was largely tech space. And then we went to, even when you look at social platforms, initially, they were largely techspace. And then we went to images with Instagram. And then we went to video with tick tock the path our beyond video video will be promising the next five to 10 years, I would imagine. And one of the reasons why videos taken off is one, it's more engaging and immersive. And two, because cell phone bandwidth, cell phone speeds will improve to a level where you can stream video at pretty good quality very quickly nowadays. And as bandwidth improves more and more, I think you're gonna start seeing more and more 3d content. That's why Mehta and Mark Zuckerberg they're betting big on 3d and VR and AR, because it's the natural progression, right when you go from text to images to video. The next step after that is 3d content. And so meta, I guess they're competing with tic tock tic TOCs really changed the world with video and they don't want to miss the boat with 3d, which is the next frontier. And so they're investing in that. So that's how I see it going video itself. We are still in the early days of like you're starting to see some video. I think you'll you'll see more immersive video where it's two way conversations versus just one person talking to another so I think you will see video but assessments embedded on it. Then things like that over the next five years.
Alexander Sarlin:So do you see a future in which Professor Jim continues to evolve in a Metaverse based world and you can create a 3d avatar of any teacher or any celebrity to become your teacher?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah. So I spend a lot of my career working with this guy called Rich Paige who co founded a company with Steve Jobs. And he built the first Macs at Apple, which Steve, and which used to say, never talk about future products before you release them. And Steve used to hate it when someone leaked something to the press about a future product. So I wouldn't comment on future products. I'm going to remember the lessons he gave me over the years. But the metaverse will happen, I don't know whether it's five years or 10 years, but you will see some sort of augmented reality or virtual reality, they call it over the next 10 to 15 years, I believe.
Alexander Sarlin:We won't press you on future business or future products. But I think there's definitely something interesting in there. So you've mentioned textbook publishers, and people who make video courses at scale as some of your core business customers. We've seen through this podcast and through some of the companies that are rising, the rise of what we sometimes call the teacher printer, educators who have spent years in the classroom and are now starting to take their experience out into the broader world, that companies like out school or Teachers Pay Teachers, do you think that that is a potential use case for Professor Jim, where a teacher can say, I want to turn myself into a video property and make 100 videos out of my curriculum, but I've never done a video course before?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, we do allow that to happen. As long as someone creates videos at scale, we should be able to support them. And the reason why we decided to focus on videos at scale in the beginning, is you want to get some traction in the market, you know, work with people who create a lot of content, make the product good. And after that go after the smaller customers. So yeah, we should be able to help people, some people, we are able to help right away, like people who do things at scale. Our aim is in the next 12 months or so we need to be able to support any teacher in America, they need to be able to take stuff and create high quality video content very, very easily, and make the experience for their students really good. Yeah.
Alexander Sarlin:So one question I want to ask you and I if this is a curveball, just let me know. But one of the types of generative AI that's gotten a lot of attention recently, is the type of AI that can turn text into images, the sort of mid journey and Dolly, I'm curious if you see any tangential use case or adjacent use case for education, you know, if you're taking a organic chemistry textbook and turning it into a video course, and you need to create slides that show different kinds of cells and different kinds of interactions. Obviously, you can use any of the images that are already in the textbook, but is there a chance to create new images purely through AI.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:So we actually do that map product right now, when we create slide decks, we take the text, we don't just use the images in the textbook, we find other images on the internet, we generate new images as well. And so we are using that already. So you came up with a neat idea you didn't know we had it in our product and you came up with a new product, you're
Alexander Sarlin:ahead of me ahead of the curve 200 patents gives you some inventor, you're thinking three steps ahead. I love it. That's really exciting. So what's so interesting about Professor Jim is that you're basically transferring from what they call, you know, a call to a hot medium, right? You're taking text, which is asks, you know, learners or readers to bring a huge amount to it. And they have to be able to picture everything in and they have to be able to read it at a certain pace, and you're making it come to them, you're putting it in a pace, you're putting it coming, it's going to come out of the mouth of a person, you're going to make the things that they're trying to let you picture into actual images that you can picture. And that seems really transformative for a lot of learners who don't like to read, frankly, I mean, it's becoming less and less common. Sadly, I think but true about learners. I imagine your goal is not to get people to read less. That's not obviously not the point of our Professor Jim, tell me a little bit about that transfer from Wikipedia text or a page of a textbook, which kids can find so intimidating to a sort of warm video with images. What does that feel like for learners?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:So they're actually learning studies out there, which indicate the sort of multimedia content where text is combined with images and audio is more engaging for learners. And it leads to better learning outcomes as well because Feel imagine when you're reading, that you're essentially just exercising that you're reading muscles, so to speak. But when you see one of our videos, you're essentially hearing things as well, you're reading things on the subtitles, you're reading summaries on the slides. So with chest X, you're seeing images on the slides as well. And you're seeing this avatar, talking to the whole thing. So you're engaging a lot more than you're reading muscles, you're engaging, you're hearing engaging, you're engaging your eyes as well. And there are studies which show multimedia content does give better learning outcomes. Lots of papers have been published over the last 10 years. So it's natural to expect that in terms of learning, besides, the average person learns better through multimedia than text. But there are some people who have dyslexia, and other ADHD and stuff like that. And for those people, converting textbooks into the sort of video content can be transformative. And as many as 10% of the people out there have some form of dyslexia is what we're hearing. So this could be transformative for those populations. I believe.
Alexander Sarlin:That is a great point. I didn't even think about that side of the world. But that is hugely important. And you have accessibility guidelines to for screen readers for people who are visually impaired or have attention disorders or reading disorders. So you're absolutely right, the ability to change the format can be completely transformational for a lot of learners. I want to ask one more question. And this is a little bit of an odd one. But this idea of these avatar based courses has just got my brain going in many different directions. So in the age of AI, one of the things that's starting to come up in the in the media, at least is this feeling of, well, we may not have control over our image anymore. And it's sort of a deep fake world. I'm curious about how you think about if somebody has written a textbook for a textbook publisher, and then says, You know what, I'll send you some selfies so that you can digitize me and I can deliver the content in the textbook. How does that relationship work in terms of future content? What does the textbook publisher, it seems like there's a whole legal interesting area there where the textbook publisher, do they own the right to make that professors say anything for the textbook closer? It feels like there's some interesting ideas in there that are yet to be discussed about how to protect your image, if you're an instructor giving over your likeness to an avatar. I'm not a lawyer by any means. But I'm curious, have you encountered any of that in some of your work with the publishers?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yeah, so in terms of privacy, that's something that's pretty important, okay. Because I'm seeing people misuse others photos, and morph them into all kinds of things. Some of them do it for fun. Some of them have more weird objectives, so to speak. So for our company, you know, it's very important for us to have good morals and do what's right more than what makes money. So from our point of view, the only people whose avatars we create are people who give us permission, or if they passed away, the estate needs to give us permission, or the other option is that people have passed away more than 80 years back, then they don't have postmortem rights to publicity anymore. And if they're more than if they passed away more than 80 years back it, you know, people didn't know that passed away, so we can use that stuff. So if we recreate Abraham Lincoln, there's a VHS all over the road on tax day, for example. So I don't think that hurts anyone. So that's our company policy, people either need to give us permission, or they should have passed away at least eight years back. And it should be legally permissible. So in terms of copyrights with publishers, so it all depends on the contract between the publisher and the author. If the author has copyright to that piece of content, the author can give us the content and allow us to use their avatar and teacher video course of it. If it's the publisher, who's got the copyright, if you're going to use the avatar of the author, then daughter needs to get permission. Otherwise, you know, it's not the right thing to do. So that's our policy on that right now.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, no, that's a great answer. It makes a lot of sense. It's just a whole kind of the law that you know, haven't we, I think many people haven't thought much about but that idea about if they're, if it's if they've passed away more than 80 years ago, they're sort of likenesses in the public domain, for lack of a better word is really interesting. And I think that creates a lot of opportunity for educational options, what 80 years ago now is 1940 or so. 19. 42 So anything before World War Two is fair game, basically, really interesting.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:So we can create a whole lot of historical figures. New York has postmortem right to publicity, which is somewhat different. Someone passed away in New York till the year 2000. allowed to use that likeness. Instead, last just recently, so different countries have different laws on these as well.
Alexander Sarlin:This whole field of education is just so exciting. And I think seeing somebody with your background step into edtech, with such an innovative suite of ideas, is thrilling for those of us who have been in there for a while, and I think it's going to accelerate the whole field. And it's going to allow many different publishers and many different types of educators to make their content more accessible to more different types of learners with more representation than ever before. It's a really exciting innovation. So we always wrap up our interviews with two questions. And the first one is, what is a trend in the EdTech field that you've seen rising that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?
Dr. Deepak Sekar:Yes, so one thing I think we see more and more of is gamification of educational content. They're kind of doing that with a product by creating all these historical figures and teaching, but I see more and more games being used for edtech purposes. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:and you mentioned the motivation. And I think it's very engaging and motivating to use game mechanics. We've had a few different guests on the show who do gamification or game based learning, and they're, you know, I think it's really starting to be ubiquitous in education. And what is a resource? You know, you have such a deep background in so many different technical fields, as well as fields of AI and education. What's a resource that you would recommend for anybody who wants to go deeper into any of the topics we discussed
Dr. Deepak Sekar:today? Yeah, I would suggest people play with Unity and Unreal Engine, which allows you to create games easily, and try to make a few games for teaching some concepts yourself. That would be my recommendation.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, that's a good suggestion and Unity and Unreal both also have fantastic educational resources and tutorials and ways for people to get involved because they know that there's more people coming in all the time. And that's a great to really get your hands on the sort of what it takes to model the type of educational tool and educational character and you know, avatar that we see and Professor Jim as well. Thank you so much, Dr. Deepak say car, you are doing incredible work, and bringing an entire new toolset to all of us in edtech to do what we all want to do, which is bring the best education to the most people. Thanks so much for sharing your story. Professor jim.com Our Prof. jim.com It's PR o f. J i m.com. And thanks for being here with us on Ed Tech insiders.
Dr. Deepak Sekar:And thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.