Stanley Salvatierra

In Bolivia alone, more than 20,000 traffic accidents happened in 2018. It's estimated that 1,420 people die yearly from these accients, according to the Bolivian Police Force. Worldwide, vehicle collisions are one of the top ten most frequent causes of death, according to The World Health Organization (WHO).

Having that in mind, electric engineer and entrepreneur Stanley Salvatierra decided to focus on creating products capable of reducing road fatalities. He went along and cofounded a start-up named Micro Deep Systems and developed his first product, a unique web camera. This device is gifted with an artificial vision algorithm capable of detecting vehicles that skip red traffic lights. His next product was of a similar nature, a low-cost smart camera that hunts for speed violations. For the inventions listed above, Salvatierra has become a winner in the Latin American Innovators Under 35 from the MIT Technology Review LATAM edition.

The young man pinpoints, “With our first camera we wanted to minimize up to 10% of all traffic accidents.” For that value to be reached, the team had to share statistics generated by their cameras with local authorities and design strategies that could cut down roadway mortality.

MicroDeep Systems products have an open code, something that Salvatierra considers very important. “We want to promote enterprises opening up their data and with that, boosting the creation of new products.”

But the passion this young engineer has for open code and AI are not limited to security. He has also used technology to create software capable of detecting hand written digits in ballots used in Bolivian general elections, with the aim of verifying if  fraud has been committed or not. Salvatierra, who says that until now there was no product similar to his available, is very proud that anyone can use and even improve his gadget.

Urban Living Futures founding partner and member of the jury for the 2019 Latin American Innovators under 35, Mikele Brack, believes that Salvatierra and his project are impressive. “Stanley's career has been amazing so far, filled with interesting and astounding projects.”