Show Notes
The engineering part of Augi Lye helped solve a problem for his musician self. How to speed up the aging of wooden violins, which enhances their tone? Augi not only came up with an invention, he formed a successful company that sells devices to all string players. Â Now Augi is using artificial intelligence to help vision processing. The son of immigrant parents, Augi was thought to have a learning disability as a young boy. His fourth-grade teacher told his parents, “I’ve seen this before. Augi will blossom in his junior year of high school.” Spoiler alert: He did. *This episode was originally released on December 5, 2018.*
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: 0:01
Inventors and there inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Richard Miles: 0:40
Vibrating violins, unmanned, aerial vehicles, and video games. What do they have in common? Turns out Augi Lye, my guest today on Radio Cade. Welcome, Augi.
Augi Lye: 0:48
Hey, how’s it going?
Richard Miles: 0:49
So I think I first met you right after you had founded tone. Right? If I remember correctly, which I remember being a really cool idea. So why don’t we start by you talking about tone, right? Which was, I think the first of your companies that you founded, if I’m not mistaken and then a little bit about the technologies that you’ve worked.
Augi Lye: 1:07
Yes. So all my life, I was a musician. I started my musical studies at five, played the violin all my life and pursuit of the perfect tone in your instrument that I was obsessed about. And when you’re shopping for a violin, there’s a common problem of instruments that haven’t opened up yet. Especially new instruments that they require about 30 or 40 years of being played on constantly for them to open up. That’s one reason Strads sounds so good. They’ve been played on for hundreds of years and that constant being played on improves the sound. So how it all started was I was still in college and I bought this new cello. I could tell this cello is a good cello, but it was closed up. It n eeds to be played on for next few years before w e r eally could really start sounding good. And I didn’t want to wait that long. So I was playing around with electronics. At that time, I was studying electrical engineering and I put together a little device that would play the instrument overnight while I was sleeping. So I invented this little contraption and I put it on the instrument. I left it on overnight and I did this for about a month. And then a month later I brought the cello back to the maker and the maker was j ust like, what did you do? This thing? This doesn’t sound like the cello I sold you. And I went back to my car and pulled out this little electronic contraption, not thinking much of i t. I t’s just a little thing I made for myself. And his next words were run to the patent office.
Richard Miles: 2:32
How does it work? I’ll give you that for you want to say contraption, what exactly?
Augi Lye: 2:35
It’s a device that sits on top of the violin bridge or on top of the strings on a guitar. And it induces subsonic frequencies into the instrument , simulating being played on and over a course of a week, if you use this every night, it’s comparable to about six months of being played on it’s night and day.
Richard Miles: 2:54
And this is something you can just plug in and put on the bridge of your instrument overnight, and it, you don’t leave anything. And then when you wake up Next morning, you take it off and you play it. And it sounds so much better, a particular frequency or tone that you’re going forward , that you have to sort of tweak it or adjust it, or is this history universal or?
Augi Lye: 3:11
There’s a dial, which you can modulate the amplitude. But other than that, pretty much turnkey. Yes . It’s very turnkey. It’s very easy.
Richard Miles: 3:17
So we’ll talk a little bit about how you had the skillset to figure this out. Cause you’re also an electrical engineer, but before that, there are at least a couple of other technologies you’ve worked on since tone, right? That if you could just explain what’s going on there. I think computer vision processing and something to do with UAVs.
Augi Lye: 3:32
So the first startup I joined, not as a founder, but I was employee number one was a UAV company. And we were the first company that built a plane that could see a tree and fly around it. And this was back in 206. Before UAV’s , b ecame hot. And I was a c omputer vision sc ientists t h at c ame up with the algorithm that could do this. But yeah, that was a lo t of fun.
Richard Miles: 3:54
And then recently also in the AI space, you’ve been working on just kind of a crowded space now.
Augi Lye: 4:02
Yeah. It’s a hot market, like 10 years ago. No one knew what AI learning was. There wasn’t the word, deep learning. All these words weren’t even invented yet.
Richard Miles: 4:08
Right. Now all you have to do to sound sophisticated cocktail parties just drop AI into a sentence .
Augi Lye: 4:13
All of a sudden you’re popular. So my latest company is Charlotte AI. We came up with a bunch of optimization tools for Facebook marketing in particular, we have a feature called common control and it’ll read through all your Facebook pages and ads and see all the negative comments, jot them down, analyze them. And then if they’re bad bullying, negative, toxic, it will automatically hide them.
Richard Miles: 4:37
Wow. Is this meant for like a business or an organization that has a Facebook page or could it be an individual ?
Augi Lye: 4:42
Well , even parents that want to monitor their children’s Facebook pages, make sure there’s no bullying going on or anything like this.
Richard Miles: 4:49
Uh , my question is, the internet. Where on earth are you going to find negative comments? I mean, I don’t get it Augi. It’s a wasteland. It’s nothing but a civic discussion.
Augi Lye: 4:57
I’m trying to clean things up.
Richard Miles: 4:58
Okay. All right. So we’re going to talk later on a little bit more of the business angle of each one of these technologies. But before we do that, let’s talk about you a little bit, go back to pre academia even. And what did your parents do for a living? Where were you born? What were you like as a kid and t hat sort of t hing?
Augi Lye: 5:13
Yes, my mom is from Korea and my dad’s actually a refugee from Burma. Burma, Myanmar has an interesting past, he was a Burmese, but ethnically Chinese and in the fifties and sixties, they kicked out all their Chinese. Basically ethically cleansed them all. So my dad came to America, studied very hard, became a doctor. My mom’s a nurse. So they, they met in New York City. I was born in New York. Ended up in Florida.
Richard Miles: 5:39
First time that’s ever happened, right. So what age were you when you moved to Florida?
Augi Lye: 5:43
I was like two.
Richard Miles: 5:44
Oh, okay. Okay. So you basically grew up in Florida.
Augi Lye: 5:47
I’m a Florida boy.
Richard Miles: 5:48
In Gainesville or elsewhere in Florida?
Augi Lye: 5:50
Jacksonville.
Richard Miles: 5:51
Jacksonville. Okay. U m,
Augi Lye: 5:53
I survived Jacksonville.
Richard Miles: 5:53
So your dad was a, what kind of doctor was he?
Augi Lye: 5:58
Psychiatrist.
Richard Miles: 5:59
Psychiatrist. Okay. And what were you like as a student? I’m guessing you were a great student.
Augi Lye: 6:03
Many of my teachers thought I had a learning disability
Richard Miles: 6:07
Interesting. And this was because?
Augi Lye: 6:09
This was because I would often just stare in a corner and just think elementary school, middle school, and a good portion of my high school. I wasn’t a very good student. There’s only two things. I was good at mathematics and science. But my fourth grade teacher, she told my parents I’ve seen this before. Your kids are very good kid. Junior, senior year of high school expect him to blossom. And that’s exactly what happened. Like my parents t ell me this now, but like,
Richard Miles: 6:35
They were probably panicking at the time. They were like,
Augi Lye: 6:36
What’s wrong with our son? Like his sister is so smart, but something’s wrong with him. But now literally, like if you looked at my GPA prior to junior year of high school, my GPA was like terrible. It was like 2.5, then all of a sudden junior, senior year I made straight A’s and in graduated,
Richard Miles: 6:54
Do you remember something clicking all of a sudden, did it?
Augi Lye: 6:57
Yeah . Like my brain also in like crystallize , all the other subjects started making sense.
Richard Miles: 7:01
Right. So you were strong in math and sciences. And where did you go to school?
Augi Lye: 7:05
I went to University of Florida.
Richard Miles: 7:07
University of Florida. Okay. And did you know right away you wanted to go into engineering or did you consider?
Augi Lye: 7:12
I initially went into music. I went into violin performance major my freshman year.
Richard Miles: 7:18
So clearly you are good at other things than math and science when you’re a kid , when did you start playing music? Oh , we already said five.
Augi Lye: 7:24
Yeah, I started at five. So all my life up until like 22, I wanted to be a musician. That was like my obsession in life with music. Absolute obsession was music.
Richard Miles: 7:34
And you started on stringed instruments?
Augi Lye: 7:35
Yeah I started in violin. I started on the violin.
Richard Miles: 7:39
And then graduated to cello?
Augi Lye: 7:40
Yeah I picked up the cello along the way.
Richard Miles: 7:43
And so were either of your parents, a musician?
Augi Lye: 7:45
My mom plays a little piano, not professionally as amateur pianist .
Richard Miles: 7:49
So clearly at some point, was it in college that you then started getting into engineering? Or what, how did that sequence happen?
Augi Lye: 7:56
Yeah, what happened was I joined a rock band. I toured for two years. And then when that didn’t work out, I was like, screw music. I g ot t o do something else. And I always loved mathematics. So engineering was just right there.
Richard Miles: 8:08
So you started out as a freshman music major and then what? By next year or the couple of years later, you switched to an engineering? But you still continue to play music, right? You didn’t give that up?
Augi Lye: 8:19
No, I still play.
Richard Miles: 8:20
Alright. So, interesting started as a musician ended up in engineering and now you continue to do both. And to what extent do you think your musical training shaped your ability to do what you’re doing now in the tech field?
Augi Lye: 8:33
Absolutely. So there’s one thing about music. That’s very paramount is focus and concentration. If you’re performing on stage, you have to have the most intense focus t o play perfectly or else it’s going to fall apart. So I think that applied very well with engineering, especially with coding.
Richard Miles: 8:50
Right. I’m not a musician. I wish I were, but my wife is, my son is and what it’s always fascinated me about music, particularly classical musicians is in the same space. You have to be very disciplined, very, very creative, or there’s a space to be creative within that discipline. So it strikes me that in coding, right? You have something similar. You have definite rules absolutely must be obeyed, but yet you’ve got this wide space to be creative in.
Augi Lye: 9:16
You’re absolutely correct. So when you write code, if you wander off certain constructs, you won’t even compile. You’ll just get error message . Won’t work. It just won’t work. It’s almost all or nothing. But within those constraints, you have all the creative things in the world to create almost anything.
Richard Miles: 9:31
You have to create something new . Right? Otherwise what’s the point. Okay. Let’s talk about now the business angle, right? So obviously you started one business, at least one business, and yo u’re b eing associated with it at some other businesses. Describe for our listeners, the business angle of all this, you’ve got a great idea or great ideas. You’re trying to get them to market to d escribe the highs and the lows of that. What is sort of b een really pleasant about those experiences and what has not been so pleasant?
Augi Lye: 9:57
All my life I am a complete introvert. That was just my genetics. Starting these companies. One thing I realized very quickly was I had to break out my shell I have to meet people. I have to interact with people. I have to build a network so my companies have customers that was extremely difficult for me to do, but it was completely necessary. You cannot build a business being in a s how, impossible,.
Richard Miles: 10:23
Cause it’s not just investors. It’s employees,
Augi Lye: 10:25
It’s employee’s, it’s customers, it’s investors. So that was extremely difficult for me to do . But a complete necessity.
Richard Miles: 10:32
Did you seek out business mentors or did people with a business background come alongside and say, Hey Augi, here are the five steps you need to do to set up your business. Or did you have to try to figure this out on your own?
Augi Lye: 10:43
I had some good mentors. And that’s one o f my first suggestions. When I meet young entrepreneurs i s like find a good network, a good group of people that you can bounce ideas off of. Very important.
Richard Miles: 10:53
Let’s go back to tone right now. So you founded that, I think in 2006. Is that right? More or less?
Augi Lye: 10:59
Yeah, around 2006. It was sort of like a hobby until 2008. And then 2008 I went all in.
Richard Miles: 11:06
Okay. So how’s it doing now?
Augi Lye: 11:09
It’s doing good. Distribution in 39 countries, sales every month, smooth sailing.
Richard Miles: 11:13
And how is the word getting out? Is it mostly word of mouth? Are you having to do a lot of advertising?
Augi Lye: 11:19
Mostly word of mouth, the little social media. I mean our best advertisers are our customers.
Richard Miles: 11:25
And so your average customer, are they professional musicians or?
Augi Lye: 11:29
They’re accomplished musicians.
Richard Miles: 11:30
And they actually know the difference, so this is not something that some kid who’s learned how to play, the guitar is probably gonna buy or their parents.
Augi Lye: 11:36
It’s something more geared towards higher end.
Richard Miles: 11:38
Right. And do you find, is it primarily violinists or also?
Augi Lye: 11:42
The guitarists. Guitarists outsells everything 10 to 1.
Richard Miles: 11:45
And is that because they’re just more of them?
Augi Lye: 11:48
There is more of them.
Richard Miles: 11:48
Okay. What is actually happening with the ways it’s an aging, the wood in some way, or it’s conditioning, the wood or what is going on? It’s physical.
Augi Lye: 11:56
Yeah. It’s sort of all the above, there’s like 12 things going on. The most thing in particular that’s going on is a process called damping. And in damping the violins comprised of 77 different parts. And as a system settles down as it ages, if you induced vibrations into them will start vibrating together. You see this in other fields, metallurgy is a good example. They would often induce vibrations as metal cools down to prevent it from cracking and same thing with the violin after it’s made, if you induced vibrations into it, as it’s settling down, it starts singing as a chorus.
Richard Miles: 12:34
Wow. That’s fascinating. One of the things I like best s pending a s p odcasts, I feel t hat smarter after I talked to the actual inventors. Okay. So tell me about the other companies that you’ve been associated with. How are they doing in terms of their growth and business model and so on ?
Augi Lye: 12:48
So in 2010, I started a video game company did really well. We made a game called Dungeon Offenders, became a top 10 game. We released it on eight platforms, X-Box PS three PC, iPhone, Android. And it grew that company to about 125 people. And then in 2012 we sold the company.
Richard Miles: 13:07
What kind of transition was that from the world of music and engineering into video games?
Augi Lye: 13:13
Completely different , absolutely complete different.
Richard Miles: 13:15
But I presume you had an interest in video games as a kid or?
Augi Lye: 13:18
Yeah, well the software. If it’s software I’ll be interested.
Richard Miles: 13:23
Is that sort of a very niche market in terms of the type of people that play this type of games, as opposed to other types of software?
Augi Lye: 13:31
It is. So video games is entertainment. The entertainment industry is very different.
Richard Miles: 13:35
From the little I know about it. It’s a very sort of demanding market. Right? I think we talked about this a few years ago and you’re telling me that if there’s a mistake or something wrong in the game, you hear about it, like instantly yeah. In no uncertain terms, you really have to get those new versions. Right. Or near perfect. Or you’re going to hear about it immediately.
Augi Lye: 13:56
Well, first of all, if the business model of video games is the entertainment industry, it’s very close business-wise to movies because it’s based off blockbusters. One in 10 video games will make profit and the rest fail. So from a business model standpoint, it’s very difficult.
Richard Miles: 14:11
And I mentioned , there’s tons of competition ,
Augi Lye: 14:14
Tons of competition, It’s a profession of passion. Many of these video game designers, they do it out of passion. And whenever you deal with that, you have a lot of them. And you have to compete against all of them.
Richard Miles: 14:25
So for those of our listeners who don’t know, we’re in Gainesville, Florida, and one of the strengths of Gainesville a nd the University of Florida in particular is a pretty strong engineering department. So you had, I imagine one of the recipes for success in h i s c o mpanies, you had a pretty good supply of coders and engineers that you could tap.
Augi Lye: 14:43
Yeah. That’s the reason I’m here and I’ve stayed here because every year, 5,000 geniuses walked through those Gates and the University of Florida and the cost for a smart kid in this town is half that of San Francisco.
Richard Miles: 14:58
Gainesville has a competitive advantage in terms , hang onto those , that talent. Okay. What about the UAVs again? I think we mentioned it’s a crowded space. Obviously a lot of people have developed various models now of drones. Where do you see that going? What kind of applications are we going to see in the next five years? You know , already, we know now that photography is great and construction companies love them. And farmers love them. What’s around the corner that we’re going to be seeing UAV’s.
Augi Lye: 15:25
Yeah. So I think the biggest application for USBs is actually making them bigger. A lot of the science that went into UAV’s becoming stable. I was in San Juan over the weekend and there was a UAV over the pool. Someone was filming the pool in this resort and it was a constant 30 mile an hour wind. And this thing was lock stable. This was an engineering feat making this thing stable in that wind gusty one, too , and those same algorithms and techniques applied to something bigger will revolutionize aerospace. So that’s where I see that technology being applied to controls an d m ade that thing stable. Imagine that into something like a plane, we ‘re g oing to see i n the next 10 years start seeing some really interesting flying things. Th ey’re g oing to take people,
Richard Miles: 16:11
Like pilotless planes .
Augi Lye: 16:12
Exactly. Ok ay. And it was all developed from th ese small UAV’s.
Richard Miles: 16:17
So it’s interesting. I had assumed that the direction of the market would be heading towards smaller and more consumer applications where they’ll make money, they’ll make money, but it sounds like the big money is going ,
Augi Lye: 16:28
Could be in the larger, the larger planes. People are willing to pay a nice penny for it .
Richard Miles: 16:34
And then I guess, along with the UAVs , do you need special types of either coding or algorithms to process video and sound? Or do you even have sound?
Augi Lye: 16:43
Oh yeah you have sound.
Richard Miles: 16:45
Is that in any way a technological challenge, the quality of that information that a UAV can pick up versus processing out on the ground? Or is that insignificant?
Augi Lye: 16:54
You just explained some very tricky things. So vision processing is continuing to improve exponentially at this point, much research and resources being thrown in it right now. Very soon, you’re going to be able to have basically robots that can sit down, see that this is a water bottle. Know, that it’s a water bottle and can interact with it. That’s around the corner and in the lab very happening. That’s extremely exciting, very difficult problem. In the field of AI. The first step is what’s called situational analysis, basically a robot, knowing what kind of situation it’s in, Hey, I’m in a room, there’s a microphone in front of me. There’s a water bottle in front of me. Once we pass that step, which is very close. If not already happened in the lab, now we can start talking about,
Richard Miles: 17:39
What do you want to do with it?
Augi Lye: 17:40
Yeah. So we’re at literally the inflection point of AI. Wow. We’re in the last 30 years, it’s been just hardcore research, hardcore research, basically money being thrown in a pit. What’s going on to where like now we can actually make money. Great examples. That is Tesla. So I just picked up my Tesla yesterday and it drove me home. Huh ? Amazing. Of course there was a 50 mile learning period, but then after 50 miles I just turned it on and I did not have to steer anymore. Hit the brake. It just did everything. I was like, this, this is a greatest car that ever drove me. In fact, it was the only car that ever drove me.
Richard Miles: 18:15
So Augi one more question. A s someone like you, 10, 20 years ago comes to you and with a similar background, similar interests, and they’ve got a great idea and they want to put in t heir idea and sell it. Now that you’ve got all this accumulated wisdom, I don’t know if y ou had to boil it down a nd say three things that you’d give advice to a younger version of you coming along and having a great idea. What would you tell that person?
Augi Lye: 18:36
Three things and most things in life can be broken down into three things. So these are my three things that I look for. Number one, be a good person. Number two, work hard, work, hard that’s life. And number three, be smart, in t hat order, and if you stick to that, you will be successful in anything you do.
Richard Miles: 18:59
A little bit more complicated than Woody Allen’s prescription. That 90% of life is just showing up, but you’ve got to show up, be good, work hard and be smart. And that’s it?
Augi Lye: 19:09
Yeah. It’s easy. Right? So easy.
Richard Miles: 19:12
I’ll get this from fascinating conversation. Thank you for coming this morning and look forward to seeing your businesses develop and great success and look forward to seeing your Tesla on the street.
Augi Lye: 19:21
I’ll be sleeping in the back of it.
: 19:22
Thanks very much Augi for coming too.
Speaker 3: 19:26
Thank you.
Outro: 19:29
Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.
