facial recognition
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This startup reworked its privacy-friendly sensors to help battle COVID-19
One little-known home and retail automation startup might seem like an unlikely candidate to help combat the ongoing pandemic. But its founder says its technology can do just that, even if it wasn’t the company’s original plan.
Butlr, a spin-out of the MIT Media Lab, uses a mix of wireless, battery-powered hardware and artificial intelligence to track people’s movements indoors without violating their privacy. The startup uses ceiling-mounted sensors to detect individuals’ body heat to track where a person walks and where they might go next. The use cases are near-endless. The sensors can turn on mood-lighting or air conditioning when it detects movement, help businesses understand how shoppers navigate their stores, determine the wait-time in the queues at the checkout and even sound the alarm if it detects a person after-hours.
By using passive infrared sensors to detect only body heat, the sensors don’t know who you are — only where you are and where you’re heading. The tracking stops as soon as you leave the sensor’s range, like when you leave a store.
The technology is in high demand. Butlr says some 200,000 retail stores use its technology, not least because it’s far cheaper than the more privacy-invading — and expensive — alternatives, like surveillance cameras and facial recognition.
But when the pandemic hit, most of those stores closed — as effectively did entire cities and nations — to counter the ongoing threat from of COVID-19. But those stores would have to open again, and so Butlr got back to work.
Butlr’s privacy-friendly body heat sensors don’t know who you are — only where you are. Now the company is retooling its technology to help combat coronavirus. (Image: Butlr)
Butlr’s co-founder Honghao Deng told TechCrunch that it began retooling its technology to help support stores opening again.
The company quickly rolled out new software features — like maximum occupancy and queue management — to help stores with sensors already installed cope with the new but ever-changing laws and guidance that businesses had to comply with.
Deng said that the sensors can make sure no more than the allowed number of people can be in a store at once, and make sure that staff are protected from customers by helping to enforce social distancing rules. Customers can also see live queue data to help them pick a less-crowded time to shop, said Deng.
All these things before a pandemic might have sounded, frankly, a little dull. Fast-forward to the middle of a pandemic and you’re probably thankful for all the help — and the technology — you can get.
Butlr tested its new features in China at the height of the pandemic’s rise in February, and later rolled out to its global customers, including in the United States. Deng said Butlr’s technology is already helping customers at furniture store Steelcase, supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market and the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi to help them reopen while minimizing the risk to others.
It’s a pivot that’s paid off. Last month Butlr raised $1.2 million in seed funding, just as the pandemic was reaching its peak in the United States.
Nobody knew a pandemic was coming, not least Deng. And as the pandemic spread, businesses have suffered. If it wasn’t for quick thinking, Butlr might’ve been another startup that succumbed to the pandemic.
Instead, the startup is probably going to help save lives — and without compromising anyone’s privacy.
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Decrypted: The tech police use against the public
There is a darker side to cybersecurity that’s frequently overlooked.
Just as you have an entire industry of people working to keep systems and networks safe from threats, commercial adversaries are working to exploit them. We’re not talking about red-teamers, who work to ethically hack companies from within. We’re referring to exploit markets that sell details of security vulnerabilities and the commercial spyware companies that use those exploits to help governments and hackers spy on their targets.
These for-profit surveillance companies flew under the radar for years, but have only recently gained notoriety. But now, they’re getting unwanted attention from U.S. lawmakers.
In this week’s Decrypted, we look at the technologies police use against the public.
THE BIG PICTURE
Secrecy over protest surveillance prompts call for transparency
Last week we looked at how the Justice Department granted the Drug Enforcement Administration new powers to covertly spy on protesters. But that leaves a big question: What kind of surveillance do federal agencies have, and what happens to people’s data once it is collected?
While some surveillance is noticeable — from overhead drones and police helicopters overhead — others are worried that law enforcement are using less than obvious technologies, like facial recognition and access to phone records, CNBC reports. Many police departments around the U.S. also use “stingray” devices that spoof cell towers to trick cell phones into turning over their call, message and location data.
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IoT solutions are enabling physical distancing
Tyler Cracraft
Contributor
Contributor
Tyler Cracraft is an electronic engineer turned solution architect at Advantech who has more than a decade of experience working in the electronics technology industry.
If you’re a business owner or investor and are wondering about the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the business world, you’re not alone.
Today’s business leaders have been plunged into the deep end of telecommuting with little notice, and the way we do business has been impacted at almost every level. Travel is restricted, meetings are virtual and delivery of goods and even raw materials is being delayed. While some industries that depend on large gatherings are seeing extremely difficult challenges due to the pandemic, others such as the tech industry, see the opportunity and responsibility for innovation and growth.
As many states begin phased reopening, companies are trying to determine what the workplace and business environment will look like in a post-quarantine world. The first obvious step is the integration of personal protective equipment (PPE). Sanitization and face masks will become required and nonessential face-to-face meetings will be a thing of the past, along with shaking hands.
Additionally, relationship-driven careers such as sales and recruiting will have to find new ways to connect to be successful. Physical distancing rules will have to be established, which may include employees coming in alternate days while telecommuting the other days of the week to keep offices at reduced capacity. Large offices of 10 or more may implement thermographic camera technology for fever screening or other real-time technology-based health screenings.
One thing is for sure: IoT devices that enable physical distancing will become an integral part of reopening businesses, facilitating sales connections and embracing a different way of living.
Solutions for physical distancing
There are a variety of IoT devices available that can help business leaders successfully implement physical distancing in their offices. Thermographic camera technology coupled with facial recognition can create a baseline for each employee and then assist in determining if an employee has a temperature outside of their norm. Other remote health monitoring may also take place with healthcare providers, helping employees determine on a daily basis if they are well enough to go into work.
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Marietje Schaake is ‘very concerned about the future of democracy’
Scott Bade is a former speechwriter for Mike Bloomberg and co-author of “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First.”
More posts by this contributor
In the ten years she spent as a member of the European Parliament, Marietje Schaake became one of Brussels’ leading voices on technology policy issues.
A Dutch politician from the centrist-liberal Democrats 66 party, Schaake has been called “Europe’s most wired” politician. Since stepping down at the last European Parliament elections in 2019, she has doubled down with her work on cyber policy, becoming president of the CyberPeace Institute in Geneva and moving to the heart of Silicon Valley, where she has joined Stanford University as both the International Director of Policy at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, as well as an International Policy Fellow at its Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
I spoke with her about her top cyber policy concerns, the prospects of greater U.S.-EU cooperation on technology and much more.
Can you tell me about your journey from MEP in Brussels to think tank in academia?
There were a variety of reasons why I thought a third term was not the best thing for me to do. I started thinking about what would be a good way to continue, focusing on the fight for justice, for universal human rights and increasingly for the rule of law. A number of academic institutions, especially in the U.S. reached out, and we started a conversation about what the options might be, what I thought would be worthwhile. [My goal] was to understand where tech is going and what does it mean for society, for democracy, for human rights and the rule of law? But also how do the politics of Silicon Valley work?
I feel like there’s a huge opportunity, if not to say gap, on the West Coast when it comes to a policy shop — both to scrutinize policy that the companies are making and to look at what government is doing because Sacramento is super interesting.
So from a policy perspective, what areas of tech are you thinking about most?
I’m very concerned about the future of democracy in the broadest sense of the word. I feel like we need to understand better how the architecture of information flows and how it impacts our offline democratic world. The more people get steered in a certain direction, the more the foundations of actual liberalism and liberal democracy are challenged. And I feel like we just don’t look at that enough.
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Decrypted: Space hacking, iPhone vulnerability, Zoom’s security boom
Security startups to the rescue.
As we continue to ride out the pandemic, security experts are closely monitoring the surge of coronavirus-related cyber threats. Just this week, Google’s Threat Analysis Group, its elite threat hunting unit, says that while the overall number of threats remains largely the same, opportunistic hackers are retooling their efforts to piggyback on coronavirus.
Some startups are downsizing and laying off staff, but several cybersecurity startups are faring better, thanks to an uptick in demand for security protections. As the world continues to pivot toward working from home, it has blown up key cybersecurity verticals in ways we never expected. To wit, identity startups are needed more than ever to make sure only remote employees are getting access to corporate systems.
Can the startups take on the giants at their own game?
THE BIG PICTURE
Another payments processor drops the security ball
For the third time this year, a payments processor has admitted to a security lapse. First it was Cornerstone, then it was nCourt. This time it’s Paay, a New York-based card payment processor startup that left a database on the internet unprotected and without a password. Worse, the data was storing full, plaintext credit card numbers.
Anyone who knew where to look could have accessed the data. Luckily, a security researcher found it and reported it to TechCrunch. We alerted the company; it quickly took the data offline, but Paay denied that the data stored full credit card numbers. We even sent the co-founder a portion of the data showing card numbers stored in plaintext, but he did not respond to our follow-up.
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Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech’s winners and losers
Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China.
From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long.
Our conversation has been edited for length. You can also find a longer version of our chat in podcast form.
TechCrunch: There’s so much money flowing into the Bay Area and startups generally from all over the world. What happens if that slows down because of the coronavirus?
Connie Chan: It’s interesting, I was just talking to a friend of mine who is an investor in Asia, in China. And she said that some industries are going to suffer significantly. Restaurants, for example, are hurting [along with] any store that relies on foot traffic [like] bookstores, so forth. Yet you see a lot of companies also doing really well in this time. You’ll see grocery delivery as something that’s in high demand. Insurance is in very high demand. People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.
Where do you think we’ll see the biggest impact most immediately?
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Megvii, the Chinese startup unicorn known for facial recognition tech, files to go public in Hong Kong
Megvii Technology, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup known in particular for its facial recognition brand Face++, has filed for a public listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Its prospectus did not disclose share pricing or when the IPO will take place, but Reuters reports that the company plans to raise between $500 million and $1 billion and list in the fourth quarter of this year. Megvii’s investors include Alibaba, Ant Financial and the Bank of China. Its last funding round was a Series D of $750 million announced in May that reportedly brought its valuation to more than $4 billion.
Founded by three Tsinghua University graduates in 2011, Megvii is among China’s leading AI startups, with its peers (and rivals) including SenseTime and Yitu. Its clients include Alibaba, Ant Financial, Lenovo, China Mobile and Chinese government entities.
The company’s decision to list in Hong Kong comes against the backdrop of an economic recession and political unrest, including pro-democracy demonstrations, factors that have contributed to a slump in the value of the benchmark Hang Seng index. Last month, Alibaba reportedly decided to postpone its Hong Kong listing until the political and economic environment becomes more favorable.
Megvii’s prospectus discloses both rapid growth in revenue and widening losses, which the company attributes to changes in the fair value of its preferred shares and investment in research and development. Its revenue grew from 67.8 million RMB in 2016 to 1.42 billion RMB in 2018, representing a compound annual growth rate of about 359%. In the first six months of 2019, it made 948.9 million RMB. Between 2016 and 2018, however, its losses increased from 342.8 million RMB to 3.35 billion RMB, and in the first half of this year, Megvii has already lost 5.2 billion RMB.
Investment risks listed by Megvii include high R&D costs, the U.S.-China trade war and negative publicity over facial recognition technology. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch published a report that linked Face++ to a mobile app used by Chinese police and officials for mass surveillance of Uighurs in Xinjiang, but it later added a correction that said Megvii’s technology had not been used in the app. Megvii’s prospectus alluded to the report, saying that in spite of the correction, the report “still caused significant damages to our reputation which are difficult to completely mitigate.”
The company also said that despite internal measures to prevent misuse of Megvii’s tech, it cannot assure investors that those measures “will always be effective,” and that AI technology’s risks and challenges include “misuse by third parties for inappropriate purposes, for purposes breaching public confidence or even violate applicable laws and regulations in China and other jurisdictions, bias applications or mass surveillance, that could affect user perception, public opinions and their adoption.”
From a macroeconomic perspective, Megvii’s investment risks include the restrictions and tariffs placed on Chinese exports to the U.S. as part of the ongoing trade war. It also cited reports that Megvii is among the Chinese tech companies the U.S. government may add to trade blacklists. “Although we are not aware of, nor have we received any notification, that we have been added as a target of any such restrictions as of the date this Document, the existence of such media reports itself has already damaged our reputation and diverted our management’s attention,” the prospectus said. “Whether or not we will be included as a target for economic and trade restrictions is beyond our control.”
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Traces AI is building a less invasive alternative to facial recognition tracking
With all of the progress we’ve seen in deep learning tech in the past few years, it seems pretty inevitable that security cameras become smarter and more capable in regards to tracking, but there are more options than we think in how we choose to pull this off.
Traces AI is a new computer vision startup, in Y Combinator’s latest batch of bets, that’s focused on helping cameras track people without relying on facial recognition data, something the founders believe is too invasive of the public’s privacy. The startup’s technology actually blurs out all human faces in frame, only relying on the other physical attributes of a person.
“It’s a combination of different parameters from the visuals. We can use your hair style, whether you have a backpack, your type of shoes and the combination of your clothing,” co-founder Veronika Yurchuk tells TechCrunch.
Tech like this obviously doesn’t scale too well for a multi-day city-wide manhunt, and leaves room for some Jason Bourne-esque criminals to turn their jackets inside out and toss on a baseball cap to evade detection. As a potential customer, why forego a sophisticated technology just to stave off dystopia? Well, Traces AI isn’t so convinced that facial recognition tech is always the best solution; they believe that facial tracking isn’t something every customer wants or needs and there should be more variety in terms of solutions.
“The biggest concern [detractors] have is, ‘Okay, you want to ban the technology that is actually protecting people today, and will be protecting this country tomorrow?’ And, that’s hard to argue with, but what we are actually trying to do is propose an alternative that will be very effective but less invasive of privacy,” co-founder Kostya Shysh tells me.
Earlier this year, San Francisco banned government agencies from the use of facial recognition software, and it’s unlikely that they will be the only city to make that choice. In our conversation, Shysh also highlighted some of the backlash to Detroit’s Project Green Light, which brought facial recognition surveillance tech city-wide.
Traces AI’s solution can also be a better option for closed venues that have limited data on the people on their premises in the first place. One use case Shysh highlighted was being able to find a lost child in an amusement park with just a little data.
“You can actually give them a verbal description, so if you say, ‘it’s a missing 10-year-old boy, and he had blue shorts and a white t shirt,’ that will be enough information for us to start a search,” Shysh says.
In addition to being a better way to promote privacy, Shysh also sees the technology as a more effective way to reduce the racial bias of these computer vision systems that have proven less adept at distinguishing non-white faces, and are thus often more prone to false positives.
“The way our technology works, we actually blur faces of the people before sending it to the cloud. We’re doing it intentionally as one of the safety mechanisms to protect from racial and gender biases as well,” Shysh says.
The co-founders say that the U.S. and Great Britain are likely going to be their biggest markets due to the high quantity of CCTV cameras, but they’re also pursuing customers in Asian countries like Japan and Singapore, where face-obscuring facial masks are often worn and can leave facial tracking software much less effective.
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Google’s Pixel 4 smartphone will have motion control and face unlock
Google’s Pixel 4 is coming out later this year, and it’s getting the long-reveal treatment thanks to a decision this year from Google to go ahead and spill some of the beans early, rather than saving everything for one big, final unveiling closer to availability. A new video posted by Google today about the forthcoming Pixel 4 (which likely won’t actually be available until fall) shows off some features new to this generation: Motion control and face unlock.
The new “Motion Sense” feature in the Pixel 4 will detect waves of your hand and translate them into software control, including skipping songs, snoozing alarms and quieting incoming phone call alerts, with more planned features to come, according to Google. It’s based on Soli, a radar-based fine motion detection technology that Google first revealed at its I/O annual developer conference in 2016. Soli can detect very fine movements, including fingers pinched together to mimic a watch-winding motion, and it got approval from the FCC in January, hinting it would finally be arriving in production devices this year.
Pixel 4 is the first shipping device to include Soli, and Google says it’ll be available in “select Pixel countries” at launch (probably due to similar approvals requirements wherever it rolls out to consumers).
Google also teased “Face unlock,” something it has supported in Android previously — but Google is doing it very differently with the Pixel 4 than it has been handled on Android in the past. Once again, Soli is part of its implementation, turning on the face unlock sensors in the device as it detects your hand reaching to pick up the device. Google says this should mean that the phone will be unlocked by the time you’re ready to use it, as it does this all on the fly, and works from pretty much any authentication.
Face unlock will be supported for authorizing payments and logging into Android apps, as well, and all of the facial recognition processing done for face unlock will occur on the device — a privacy-oriented feature that’s similar to how Apple handles its own Face ID. In fact, Google also will be storing all the facial recognition data securely in its own dedicated on-device Titan M security chip, another move similar to Apple’s own approach.
Google made the Pixel 4 official and tweeted photos (or maybe photorealistic renders) of the new smartphone back in June, bucking the trend of keeping things unconfirmed until an official reveal closer to release. Based on this update, it seems likely we can expect to learn more about the new smartphone ahead of its availability, which is probably going to happen sometime around October, based on past behavior.
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Alibaba-backed facial recognition startup Megvii raises $750 million
One of China’s most ambitious artificial intelligence startups, Megvii, more commonly known for its facial recognition brand Face++, announced Wednesday that it has raised $750 million in a Series E funding round.
Founded by three graduates from the prestigious Tsinghua University in China, the eight-year-old company specializes in applying its computer vision solutions to a range of use cases such as public security and mobile payment. It competes with its fast-growing Chinese peers, including the world’s most valuable AI startup, SenseTime — also funded by Alibaba — and Sequoia-backed Yitu.
Bloomberg reported in January that Megvii was mulling to raise up to $1 billion through an initial public offering in Hong Kong. The new capital injection lifts the company’s valuation to just north of $4 billion as it gears up for its IPO later this year, sources told Reuters.
China is on track to overtake the United States in AI on various fronts. Buoyed by a handful of mega-rounds, Chinese AI startups accounted for 48 percent of all AI fundings in 2017, surpassing those in the U.S. for the first time, shows data collected by CB Insights. An analysis released in March by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence found that China is rapidly closing in on the U.S. by the amount of AI research papers published and the influence thereof.
A critical caveat to China’s flourishing AI landscape is, as The New York Times and other publications have pointed out, the government’s use of the technology. While facial recognition has helped the police trace missing children and capture suspects, there have been concerns around its use as a surveillance tool.
Megvii’s new funding round arrives just days after a Human Rights Watch report listed it as a technology provider to the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, a police app allegedly used to collect detailed data from a largely Muslim minority group in China’s far west province of Xinjiang. Megvii denied any links to the IJOP database per a Bloomberg report.
Kai-Fu Lee, a world-renowned AI expert and investor who was Google’s former China head, warned that any country in the world has the capacity to abuse AI, adding that China also uses the technology to transform retail, education and urban traffic among other sectors.
Megvii has attracted a rank of big-name investors in and outside China to date. Participants in its Series E include Bank of China Group Investment Limited, the central bank’s wholly owned subsidiary focused on investments, and ICBC Asset Management (Global), the offshore investment subsidiary of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.
Foreign backers in the round include a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, and Australian investment bank Macquarie Group.
Megvii says its fresh proceeds will go toward the commercialization of its AI services, recruitment and global expansion.
China has been exporting its advanced AI technologies to countries around the world. Megvii, according to a report by the South China Morning Post from last June, was in talks to bring its software to Thailand and Malaysia. Last year, Yitu opened its first overseas office in Singapore to deploy its intelligence solutions to partners in Southeast Asia. In a similar fashion, SenseTime landed in Japan by opening an autonomous driving test park this January.
“Megvii is a global AI technology leader and innovator with cutting-edge technologies, a scalable business model and a proven track record of monetization,” read a statement from Andrew Downe, Asia regional head of commodities and global markets at Macquarie Group. “We believe the commercialization of artificial intelligence is a long-term focus and is of great importance.”
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