Iván de Prado Alonso, new Head of Artificial Intelligence at Freepik Company
Freepik Company, a technology company specialized in the production and distribution of graphic assets, has just created a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) department, naming the company’s new hire, Iván de Prado Alonso, as Head of AI. This appointment not only significantly strengthens the company’s Technology team, but is a clear example of how Freepik Company uses innovation as one of its strategic cornerstones to offer users a better service every day.
Iván has been working in the field of technology for more than 10 years. In addition to founding Datasalt, a pioneer company in the area of Big Data in Spain, he has been the creator of open-source projects such as Splout SQL. In recent years, as he himself states, he has been “dazzled by artificial intelligence and its incredible disruptive capacity”, a capacity that he now has the challenge of applying in Freepik Company.
“Artificial Intelligence as a field is yet to be discovered. There are so many possibilities that it opens before us that I am delighted to join Freepik Company” says de Prado “I believe we will do great things in this field, finding disruptive applications that further transform the service we provide to the user.”
Artificial Intelligence to improve searches
Putting technology at the service of humans, and specifically all that Artificial Intelligence offers, marks the strategy that Iván de Prado has set for himself at Freepik Company. Thus, although he has just landed, he confirms that he already has a clear idea of what his first steps will be.
“We are going to apply AI to optimize, first of all, the search for assets on our platform. We will equip our system with Artificial Intelligence so that it really ‘grasps’ the language, providing understanding to the words that the user uses to search for images.”
This is an understanding that also, thanks to AI, Iván de Prado will try to bring to the images to make searches among the more than 30 million assets that make up the heart of Freepik Company more accurate.
“Artificial Intelligence will help us understand both the words the user uses and what is contained in the image of the asset. We will then be able to actually provide the user with exactly the image they want, much more efficiently. An Artificial Intelligence,” continues de Prado, “that will combine Deep Learning and Machine Learning techniques with Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing technologies, a new approach to train search models to make them more and more intelligent.”
The first applications of these technologies will have an ultimate goal: to get to know the users of the Freepik Company ecosystem in order to be able, in the very near future, to personalize the assets offered by the platform when the user performs a search, being able to recommend resources based on the type of images they are usually looking for.
Predictive models to determine what kind of new images the platform needs, according to the searches that users are doing, new tools that allow the user to edit and generate content within the platform or innovative voice-based solutions in the case of future content in video format – these are just some of the improvements and new developments that, with Artificial Intelligence as a common denominator, the new Head of AI at Freepik Company plans to address.
For Iván, joining Freepik Company is “an exciting challenge which has images and text as ingredients, the two areas where Artificial Intelligence has advanced the most in recent years. The opportunity to add value is huge.”
Joaquín Cuenca, co-founder of Freepik Company and current CEO, adds that “at Freepik Company, technological innovation is part of our DNA, as we have demonstrated since our inception. The incorporation of Iván de Prado is no more than the fruit of this commitment to innovation and to incorporate the most innovative technologies that will make the difference today.”
