Magic Pony’s Zehan Wang & Rob Bishop win Engineering Silver Medal

Magic Pony Founders, Dr Zehan Wang and Rob Bishop, who developed a machine learning technology now used by Twitter received the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal on 29th June 2017. Zehan, who is listed as one of the ‘Top 5 StartUps 2017‘ in the Top 100 Asian Stars in UK tech list  co-founded Magic Pony Technology with Rob Bishop in 2014, working together to develop a system that uses machine learning to enable more efficient delivery of images and videos on mobile devices. By optimising the technology for the computer hardware used by modern smartphones, the innovation enables high quality video streaming at reduced bandwidth – improving the quality of experience for mobile users who are accessing ever more media content.

Magic Pony Technology was acquired by Twitter in 2016, with the engineers and their team joining its Cortex division of machine-learning researchers, with the potential to apply their expertise to future problems in delivering high quality media to increasing numbers of people. The deep learning algorithms at the heart of the software predict what information has been lost in a compressed video, and can then reproduce it to reconstitute high quality footage even when the media has been transmitted at a low bit rate.

The machine learning models used in the technology have been trained using hundreds of thousands of pairs of test images – each featuring both an ideal and a corrupted version of the same scene. Using machine learning, the software learns a function that can recreate the ideal image from the corrupted version in each case, and can then be used to infer an ideal image in real world scenarios where only the corrupted image is available, such as when a low bit rate internet connection makes it impossible to transmit a full-resolution video. With the ability to generate a high quality image from incomplete data, it can deliver a seamless experience for users watching videos on Twitter or its Periscope streaming service.

Rob and Zehan received their Silver Medals at the Royal Academy of Engineering Awards Dinner at London’s Landmark hotel on 29th June 2017. Established in 1994, the Silver Medal celebrates outstanding personal contributions to UK engineering that have resulted in successful market exploitation.

The pair met while taking part in Entrepreneur First, an investment programme for enterprising engineers and technologists, where they connected over a shared drive to solve a difficult but meaningful problem. Noting the exponential growth in the computing performance of mobile devices, despite users still suffering from having limited bandwidth, they spotted an opportunity to combine their expertise to address the problem of using this newly available computational capacity to improve the quality of compressed media content.

Rob, who gained a first class master’s degree in electronic engineering from Imperial College London, was formerly the first engineering employee at Raspberry Pi. In 2014 he joined Zehan to co-found Magic Pony Technology, acting as CEO, and now leads the Magic Pony team from Twitter’s San Francisco HQ. Commenting on the award, he said: “Receiving the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal provides further validation that we achieved what we set out to do, which was to identify and work on a problem that was both technically challenging and commercially meaningful. We continue to be excited about the impact our work can have at Twitter.”

Before co-founding Magic Pony Technology as CTO, Zehan completed a PhD in visual information processing for medical image analysis at Imperial College London’s Department of Computing, and continues to be based in London, helping Twitter build a European artificial intelligence centre of excellence, acting as Engineering Manager and Technical Lead for the Magic Pony team. He commented: “It’s great to be recognised for our work with the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal. When we set out to tackle these challenges we never thought we’d come this far in just two years, but it’s been a fantastic entrepreneurial experience.”

Commending the engineers for the award, Chris Mairs CBE FREng, co-founder of Metaswitch and Venture Partner at Entrepreneur First, said: “In the last 30 years I have been privileged to work with many hundreds of highly talented software engineers, and never in that time have I encountered a partnership that delivered the brilliant combination of insight and execution so ably demonstrated by Zehan and Rob, despite both being under 30 years old.

“They have created an astonishingly valuable business – rapidly achieving a reputation at the forefront of the industry. Not only have they achieved game-changing improvements in compressed video bandwidth usage and quality with some very innovative engineering, but they did so in the highly resource-constrained environment of smart phones. They are fully deserving of the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal.”

For further information about the Royal Academy of Engineering visit www.raeng.org.uk