Allie Janoch
About Me
I am CEO of Mapistry, a software company I founded in late 2013. Mapistry makes permit compliance easy, just like TurboTax did for taxes. We are focused on permits that rely heavily on maps. The first market we are targeting is the stormwater market. It might surprise you to learn that over 200,000 permits will be submitted in the US by industrial facilities and construction sites this year. With Mapistry, our customers complete their permit in 1 hour instead of 40, saving them thousands of dollars.In 2012 and 2013, I worked on developing a new consumer product utilizing computer vision and machine learning algorithms for IQEngines. We developed an app to help people organize and search users photos by understanding what was in the actual pixels. Our app was able to stack similar photos, tag objects and scenes, and recognize faces. IQEngines was acquired by Yahoo in August 2013 and the technology we developed at IQE is making flickr search smarter.
Background / Education
I received my undergraduate degree in computer science from University of Maryland in 2009. I moved out to California in 2010 to pursue a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, but chose to leave the program early (with a Masters) in pursuit of more entrepreneurial goals.
I have been coding since I was 15 when I had the opportunity to take a high school class on Visual Basic and C++. I was encouraged to take the class by my father, who is also a software engineer. In fact, largely due to his influence, I have known since before I knew how to program that I was a going to be a computer scientist. At age 8 I asked my parents to get our first family computer (admittedly because I wanted to play KidPix). At age 12, I wrote in my 6th grade year book that my future career would be as a "software engineer."
Women in CS
Perhaps because I have known from such a young age what I wanted to do, I have not let the lack of female programmers deter me. Unfortunately, many women are not so lucky. Not everyone has a parent encouraging them to learn about programming. I am passionate about getting women and girls involved in computer science, and mentored a great group of girls in the Technovation Challenge in 2013. If you have a daughter in high school or are a female programmer looking for mentoring opportunities, I recommend you check out the program!
In the spring of 2015, Mapistry participated in MergeLane, an amazing accelerator for startups with at least one female cofounder. I really encourage startups to apply. You do not have to be an all female team (we weren't) and once you are there the fact that there are so many women doesn't matter, you're all just founders. (But it is pretty refreshing to be surrounded by so many women!) As Sue, one of the cofounder says, the ultimate success of MergeLane will mean that MergeLane isn't necessary anymore because women are no longer minorities in the startup community. I hope that is true someday soon, but until then, checkout MergeLane!
Publications
Janoch, A., Karayev, S., Jia, Y., Barron, J. T., Fritz, M., Saenko, K., & Darrell, T. (2013). A category-level 3d object dataset: Putting the kinect to work. In Consumer Depth Cameras for Computer Vision (pp. 141-165). Springer London.
Saha, B., Hoch, A., Khuller, S., Raschid, L., & Zhang, X. N. (2010, January). Dense subgraphs with restrictions and applications to gene annotation graphs. In Research in Computational Molecular Biology (pp. 456-472). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. (my maiden name is Allison Hoch)
Saenko, K., Karayev, S., Jia, Y., Shyr, A., Janoch, A., Long, J., Fritz, M., & Darrell, T. (2011, September). Practical 3-D object detection using category and instance-level appearance models. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 793-800). IEEE.
Patents
Culpepper, Benjamin J., Pierre Garrigues, Allison Janoch, and Huy X. Nguyen. Automatic Image Piling. Yahoo! Inc., assignee. Patent US 20140254946 A1. 11 Sept. 2014.