Radmantis, a Toledo-based blue technology company building intelligent underwater biosecurity and monitoring systems, announced Tuesday that Richard T. Born, M.D., a Harvard neuroscientist and leading authority on visual perception, has joined its board of directors.
The appointment, announced October 20, is built on the company’s core bet: that the hardest problems in machine vision are really problems of perception. Automated systems can count and classify well in clear conditions, Radmantis says, but the aquatic environments where its technology works are rarely clear.
Fish move in dense groups, water clarity shifts, and visually similar species have to be distinguished in real time. Human vision, the company argues, remains far better than machines at making sense of exactly those ambiguous, cluttered scenes, resolving what matters from incomplete information.
Born’s decades of research into the neural circuitry behind those perceptual abilities will directly inform the design of Radmantis’ next-generation perceptual core algorithms, the company said. His work at Harvard has focused on how the brain’s visual system constructs a reliable picture of the world from noisy and partial signals.
“Dr. Born’s work sits precisely at the intersection of biology and computation that defines our technology,” said Moira van Staaden, Radmantis’ founder and CEO. “His guidance will help us build systems that don’t just detect, but truly perceive.”
Radmantis develops its underwater monitoring technology in Toledo, in the heart of the western Lake Erie basin, where questions of aquatic biosecurity — tracking fish populations and detecting invasive species before they spread — carry direct economic and ecological weight for the region’s fisheries and water systems.
Systems of the kind Radmantis builds are used where managers need a reliable count of what is moving through the water: identifying species, tracking passage, and flagging unwanted invaders early enough to act. That work depends on cameras and software performing in murky, crowded conditions — precisely the perception problem Born’s research addresses, and the reason the company says a vision scientist belongs in its boardroom.
The board appointment adds academic depth as the company works to turn perception research into field-ready systems. Radmantis did not announce additional hires or funding alongside the appointment, but said Born’s guidance will shape the perceptual algorithms at the center of its next generation of products.