Meet Ahmed: Our AR Author Extraordinaire

Ahmed’s 5 Ws

• Who: Ahmed Bekhit
• What: Senior iOS Mixed Reality Engineer, Apprentice
• When: Coming up on 1 year at Apprentice
• Where: Boca Raton, Florida
• Why: Ahmed isn’t just an expert in augmented reality in iOS, he literally wrote the book on it!

An Inventor Since Childhood

Ahmed’s had a passion for artificial intelligence for as long as he can remember. His inspiration? Creating his dream toy: a robot that could understand and respond to his commands.

“I’ll be honest. The primary reason I got into software was to build my dream toy as a child: a robot I could interact with, one that listened to my commands. That’s when I started to realize how complex it is to build a robot. I fell into a software deep hole, and I guess I never left it. One day I'll come back to this childhood robot and bring it to life!”

Get to Know Ahmed

What motivates you? Prior to getting into software engineering at 11, I enjoyed creating my own toys as a child, from scratch. Since childhood, I’ve enjoyed building in all its forms.

What’s your work superpower? My work superpower is a deep curiosity to learn new technologies as soon as they’re developed.

What’s your non-work superpower? I love ice skating! If I had nine lives, being an Olympic figure skater would be a dream for one of them.

How do you spend your free time? At the age of 11, I made one of the biggest decisions in my life: I decided to completely quit soccer as my hobby and start writing software for fun. Ever since then, designing and building software has been my full-time job and hobby. 

It is rare that you end up turning your hobby into your occupation, but I couldn’t be more grateful that what I do on a daily basis is what I always Ioved and enjoyed doing as a child. And I love sparking that enthusiasm in others. In my spare time, I mentor and teach software engineering students about the software and tech industries.

Where do you like to travel? When it comes to taking a vacation, I value peaceful environments, nature, and taking time away from my computer and my phone. So there couldn’t be a better place than remote islands to spend such a time off. 

One of my favorite islands I’ve been to is St. John of the U.S. Virgin Island. The island is so small to the point that the second time I went there the locals remembered me. Despite how small the island is, there is a lot to experience in its national park and beautiful tropical nature.

Ahmed’s Career Journey

Ahmed is not only an incredible engineer, he’s also an entrepreneur by heart.

At the age of 17, Ahmed decided to pursue his entrepreneurial passion by starting various software businesses based in Boca Raton, Florida that focuses on developing cutting edge video processing and streaming technologies. His previous ventures have been critically acclaimed by Fortune 500 companies.

“My ultimate goal is to realize the full power of augmented reality technologies."

In the early days of Ahmed’s engineering career, he was awarded the Apple WWDC Scholarship three times in a row and was also titled “Apple’s Whiz Kid” by the Wall Street Journal at the age of 15.

As of today, Ahmed has been writing software for over a decade. He also regularly contributes to the open-source community and has been known for creating ARVideoKit; an iOS framework that renders ARKit content to capture videos, GIFs, and live photos with augmented reality components.

Ahmed has developed and published independent iOS applications that have reached over three million users. Ahmed’s work has also been integrated into Emmy-winning software — turns out that yes, there is an Emmy Award for Engineering!

Apprentice Deep Dive: Behind the Scenes

Ahmed’s incredible. But don’t just take our word for it! Check out the Wall Street Journal’s article on this Apple Whiz Kid.

And take a look at the Python Programming Language course he taught at Stanford!

“One of the major requirements of building a robot is building computer vision technologies that can be leveraged in augmented reality. That’s what brought me to Apprentice. 

Here at Apprentice, my focus is on incorporating AR into our cutting-edge life science tech. Ultimately, I seek to build groundbreaking functionalities that empower the manufacturing industry.”

Take a Look at Ahmed’s Book

That’s right, he wrote a book! In Ahmed’s book, Computer Vision and Augmented Reality in iOS, he shows you how to take full advantage of computer vision technologies. 

Interacting with other people online usually involves user-generated images and videos; whether it be “memes,” short videos, or heavily modified images. Before smartphones, generating this content required a professional using high-level image and video editing software. Not anymore.

In Ahmed’s book, you’ll learn how to use popular computer vision capabilities such as facial recognition, image to text analysis and, of course, recording a video of a dancing hot dog in your living room.

Starting with the history of computer vision, image and video processing fundamentals, and an introduction to developing augmented reality applications, you’ll learn ways to incorporate computer vision both in the content you create and the apps you develop for end users.

Read this book if you want to learn how to: 

• Incorporate mathematics related to computer vision into your apps
• Host computer vision models remotely for mobile use
• Implement visual-inertial state estimation algorithms for mobile augmented reality

You’ll find out how computer vision works, how augmented reality renders digital graphics into the physical world via an iPhone’s camera, and how to incorporate these technologies into your own apps. Get the book.

Check Out Ahmed’s Published Articles

Want to find out more about Ahmed and his views on the future of augmented reality? We’re right there with you. You can check out three of his published pieces here:

1. How to Live Stream Your iOS Game to Twitch in Real Time
2. Creating a Custom Core ML Model Using Python and Turi Create
3. Recording ARKit Videos & Animated GIFs Using ARVideoKit

Are you our Next Apprentice Spotlight?

Want to work with brilliant inventors like Ahmed? Check out our open positions today! Explore careers at Apprentice.

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