International Women’s Day Spotlight: Violet Snell, Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Violet Snell is Acusensus’ Lead Machine Learning Engineer. Violet’s talents include “very technical things,” such as mathematics programming and software development.

“My aim and purpose is to build things that are useful and improve people’s lives. Ultimately, that’s what I want to apply my energies and talents towards,” Violet shared.

With over 30 years of experience coding, Violet began her impressive career by earning her Engineering and Computer Science masters at Oxford. Working in broadcast technology in research positions, Violet developed algorithms for video processing. Her “claim to fame” was being involved in the first Matrix movie. Violet worked on the movie’s “bullet time,” “where the camera seems to pan around in slow motion, but the actors are also moving as this happens,” Violet reminisced. “That was done with our motion estimation technology at the time – and that’s the kind of fun things I played with in my early years.”

After 15 years in the industry, Violet earned a PhD in automated visual recognition of medical microscopy images. She also worked as a lab assistant demonstrator, and trained as a fully qualified lecturer.

She has previous experience of road safety applications having worked on improving automatic number plate detection (ANPR) and vehicle identification for speed enforcement. In many places, vehicle types including cars, trucks and buses have different speed limits, so her technology was significant in evolving speed enforcement technology.

In 2022, Violet learned about Acusensus when Acusensus partnered with UK entities for a trial of our Heads-Up solution, which detects if a driver improperly uses their mobile phone or seatbelt. Her interest was piqued, “That for me was a kind of very direct head-on tackling of something that everybody knew was a major problem but nobody had a solution for.” Last year, we were thrilled to welcome Violet to our team. She quickly demonstrated her skills in machine learning, problem-solving resilience and continuous improvement. Today, Violet is most excited about Acusensus’ emerging innovations. She believes she has a few tricks up her sleeves as we work to produce world-first solutions to tackle unaddressed road safety problems. Violet will continue to be an integral leader and teammate as we are “changing behaviours, saving lives” on the road.