About Us

Our team has decades of experience in computational face analysis, apparent emotion estimation, machine learning, and computer vision.

Blueskeye is led  by Professor Michel Valstar who is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Blueskeye AI and a Full Professor in Automatic Human Behaviour Understanding in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. 

He is an expert in machine learning, computer vision and facial expression analysis and a  thought leader in affective computing and social signal processing. Over 20 years in this field his work has been cited over 18,000 times in over 100 peer reviewed publications. He is the organiser of 9 international conferences on the subject.

Professor Michel Valstar co-founded Blueskeye AI in 2019, with Dr Anthony Brown (CTO) and  Head of Advanced Engineering, Dr Timur Almaev.

Professor Michel Valstar is supported by a team of 30 colleagues, including 10 PhD qualified experts. 

We are a diverse, value led team drawn from across the world, and our cultural heritage and ways of working allow us to share ideas, traditions, and learning from one another. 

Ethical Technology

What we value in our technology

  • At BlueSkeye we want our software to work for everyone, irrespective of apparent Gender, age, ethnicity and circumstance.

    This is not always the case. There have been a number of widely publicised missteps where algorithmic bias is a result of training datasets skewed towards overly male, Caucasian or English Speaking training sets. 

    To guard against this we have completed a model bias evaluation of our face tracker across images of  different age, gender and ethnicity.  

    Our analysis concludes that the face tracker continues to be effective irrespective of age, apparent gender and ethnicity.

  • We create our technology with privacy included by design. 

    Data collection and storage is minimised wherever practical, and we process all data on people’s own devices, without using the cloud. Users choose who they share their data with, and when they do so and always with end-to-end encryption.

  • Many advanced AIs, like deep learning neural networks, are complex black boxes, making it impossible to fully explain the internal logic behind the outputs. Lack of transparency prevents humans from verifying system soundness. 

    Our AI models are designed to be interpretable and transparent, with predictions based on readily verifiable data, resulting in an AI system where outputs can be checked independently. 

    Greater transparency not only enables auditing AIs for bias, but also keeps humans meaningfully in the loop so we don't fully surrender agency to machines.

  • We have designed our technology to run on edge including on mobile devices.

    However, mobile hardware has limitations on memory, storage space, and computational power. That's why our team has engineered our machine learning software to be lightweight and efficient from the start.

Quality Assurance

Blueskeye AI has been awarded ISO 27001 certification for its Information Security Management System.

ISO27001 is an international compliance framework set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the world’s largest developer of voluntary international standards, and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). 

Certification recognises Blueskeye’s information security management program is comprehensive, follows leading practices and demonstrates the company’s commitment to the highest levels of information security by everyone in the organisation. 

Certification follows an independent third-party audit conducted by the British Assessment Bureau who are in turn accredited by the The United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) the only government-backed body for ISO certification in the United Kingdom.

Awards and Achievements

We are featured as one of the most promising AI startups

Our Team

Meet the people behind the scenes

Founders and board

  • Founder, Chief Evangelist and Scientific Officer (CESO)

    Professor Michel Valstar is a co- founder of BlueSkeye AI and an Honorary Professor in Automatic Human Behaviour Understanding in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham.

    He is an expert in machine learning, computer vision and facial expression analysis and a thought leader in affective computing and social signal processing. Over 18 years in this field his work has been cited over 17000 times in over 100 peer reviewed publications. He is the organiser of 9 international conferences on the subject.

  • Founder, CTO

    PhD in Computer Science, systems and networking 4 years researching edge computing and privacy-preserving AI and Machine learning 10 years experience software engineering and project management.

  • Founder, Head of Advanced Engineering

    University of Nottingham PhD graduate with a background in machine analysis of human affect states specialised in mobile, desktop and server deployment of machine learning tools for automatic affect estimation.

Management

  • CEO
    Steve Cliffe is a highly experienced serial technology entrepreneur, CEO, business advisor and NED, who has a proven track record in marketing, business planning, sales and manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia.

    A clear strategic thinker that has developed and implemented successful marketing, product and business models to dramatically improve company margin, business performance and valuation.

    An accomplished negotiator who has achieved significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements in all areas of business.

  • VP Business Development

    Sarah has 10 years experience of working in various roles in the health sector.

    Before joining Blueskeye AI, she was National Manager at Patients Know Best (PHKB), where she led the rollout of Patients Know Best [a software as a service, patient controlled record] in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the devolved nations of the United Kingdom.

    Throughout her career Sarah has continued with her academic interests completing an MSc in Social Research and a PhD. Sarah’s doctoral research focused on patient centred care in gastroenterology and outpatient settings.

  • Chair
    Rebecca Ganz (Becks) is a dynamic Non-Executive Director (NED) and highly experienced strategy advisor to Boards, C-Suites and Entrepreneurs. With a NED portfolio spanning Education, Institutional Health & Business, Becks offers a compelling mix of disruptive, entrepreneurial know- how with best practice corporate governance. Core abilities include designing finely honed strategic direction underpinned by pragmatic guidance on effective implementation. She combines sensitivity to cultural and stakeholder requirements born of a global career across a range of sectors, with a readiness to challenge. As such, Becks thrives on change – guiding and facilitating ambitious, purpose driven teams to achieve each organisation’s potential.

  • Chief Commercial Officer
    Charlie joined Blueskeye in December 2023.

  • Go To Market & Early Adoption
    John is an active angel investor and board advisor for early stage technology companies. He actively supports his portfolio of AI companies and is retained by Consilience Ventures, as a commercial and AI expert, as well as a member of their investment committee.

    Previously he was the founding shareholder of Aurora, which became the market leader in AI solutions for the air sector, before a successful exit. His business career includes two decades leading WIT Consultancy, which was a respected boutique, that had the privilege to lead some of the most complex and challenging global commercial programs in the Telecoms, Technology and Banking sectors.

  • Head of Research and Development
    Mani has 6 years of research and development experience in Computer Vision and Applied Machine Learning. Before starting at BlueSkeye, he was a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham. His doctoral research focused on uncertainty-aware and label-efficient deep learning for facial and vocal emotion recognition.

    Prior to joining grad school, he worked in industrial R&D projects on driver monitoring systems, in which he developed low-latency ML models for embedded systems. He received his Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering from IIIT RK Valley. Mani is interested in solving problems at the confluence of statistical machine learning, human expressive behaviour analysis, and software engineering.


Careers

Our collaborative culture is made up of people from different backgrounds and disciplines. We value diversity.

Current Vacancies

We look for people to join Blueskeye AI who are committed to continuous learning, personal growth, claiming ownership and taking responsibility, and to making a positive contribution to the world through technology