Facial Authentication and Machine Learning Algorithms – Tina D’Agostin, Alcatraz AI

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Tina D’Agostin. Who is CEO for Alcatraz Ai, and we're talking about facial authentication, which is different than facial recognition, Tina. Welcome the show.

Mike thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on the show. All right, well walk us through what the difference is exactly between what everybody knows about and everybody's kind of like flipping out about somebody in Madison Square Garden is trying to keep their enemies out of there Arena versus what we might think of as facial authentication and perhaps more of a useful solution for this particular type of Technology.

as a Is really delivering a modern biometric solution using the credential using the faces of credential and we do it very quickly very privately at an authenticate at the access point. So we deliver friction act frictionless Access Control. We strengthen security while keeping user privacy protected and so the difference between facial authentication and facial recognition is traditional Legacy biometric Solutions typically have a database and they match a face against that database sometimes without the users knowing and in facial authentication.

The user is acting in and is where that they are being authenticated. And it's all done at the edge. How hard is the set this up?

Because I think some of the reputation for these Technologies is they're kind of high-end and they're only going to be used for the most critical use cases where somebody is a CEO and their accessing something of super super secret. Yeah, I think Coca Cola recipe or something like that or do you think that all this is heading more mainstream? I think it'll be more mainstream.

Our vision is to make it more ubiquitous and through the technology. We've been able to develop that makes it autonomous. It's very easy to enroll.

It's very easy for the user as they come up to authenticate at the door and that autonomous experience is taking a lot of what was the concern with Legacy Biometrics off the table in that it's easy to deploy. It's easy to use and because of our protected IP. We actually don't store personal identifiable information.

So we take the Privacy concern off the table for the companies and the end users. What makes it simple to deploy. Is it a cloud service and my accessing a GUI and API or how do I kind of connect all this?

you all done very similar to if users are using face ID on the iPhone you swipe up you authenticate very passively our founder worked on the development team for a face ID and then decided that he wanted to use a similar technology in the physical world. So the intention was to have a seamless experience much like you do on the iPhone other than you don't even have to swipe up you actually walk up to the door and you're passively authenticated before you even get there. And so everything is done on edge processing and that's what allows us to be much quicker and for the experience to be so seamless.

Is there enough Edge processing out there to drive that level of seamless interaction or do we still waiting for more embedded systems everywhere? I actually we have cracked the code on doing it on the edge. We protect over a million customers today across 30 Fortune 2000 companies cross various verticals.

So we protect corporate campuses data centers critical infrastructure Healthcare and a variety of others. So do you think that passwords and pins will be going the way to the dodo soon? Is that kind of what we're working towards that is absolutely the intention and I think users would ask for that experience as well.

I mean look we've been using the same technology in the physical access control space for over 30 years in regards to the proximity cards, which is what is most commonly deployed today. There's even keypads still out there which is an even older technology over 40 years old and it provides a very bad user experience and we've probably all had the experience we get to the door. We forgot our access badge and now we have to knock on the door or go to a different door to to be let in it's it's not a good experience for the user and we've been able to transform that it actually happened to me at our corporate headquarters.

We just moved into a new headquarters in Cupertino. We hadn't deployed the rocks yet had a legacy. Badge system I showed up one morning didn't have my badge was knocking on the window finally was let in and then we got the Rocks deployed and it was truly transformative now.

I can't imagine going back to a building and actually carrying my card. And of course, there are people who are passing cards around to each other all day long and kind of just in running the system as it's intent because it's somewhat inconvenient. I'm however, we also see a lot of talk about these new AI platforms and how eventually they may be able to recognize or even generate faces.

So do we have to worry about that in the future or do you think we can and run that or what those types of future-minded attacks? Well, we see it as an advantage. We actually use Ai and machine learning and the benefit is users use the Rock We we update their profiles over time.

So if a phase changes if someone grows a beard or their hair changes, we actually use machine learning to keep the profile accurate. So we see Ai and machine learning is a true advantage and as people are trying to do more with less. It's about automating the experience at the building so we can use Ai and machine learning to actually reduce costs to provide a better experience.

But also to make it safer. It's far more reliable to use the unique power of the human face then like as you mentioned badges can be stolen lost replicated. So it's the most highly secure form of all the Authentication.

Creates efficiency and it provides the better experience. Who's in charge of this because we've been talking about the convergence of physical and it security for some time, but they're always seem to be different groups within an organization. That didn't always kind of work well together.

So how is this all come in from your perspective to be more cohesive? The access control system is for physical security is managed by the the physical security team with it is very close partners that convergence of physical and cyber security has been occurring over the last couple decades because it runs on its infrastructure. And it is also concerned with protecting physical breaches because physical breaches lead to cybersecurity breaches.

So they really work together and you see these Solutions deployed across numerous stakeholders, not just physical security and it but also corporate real estate facilities HR. It's really a team sport because everyone is now using the data that is found at the door to make decisions about the real estate portfolio. How often they're buildings are occupied when they're used so there's a lot of other uses for that data, but there is definitely a close collaboration between physical security and it security And ultimately we want to know where folks are because there's people pretending to be them or remote Bad actors and if they're in the office, they can't be in two places at once, right?

That's exactly right in carrying a card. If you have the card, there's no way to authenticate that you are the the correct card holder. So by providing that multifactor authentication in using the face, we're able to confirm an authenticate that the person who is presenting.

The card is actually the person who is authorized to go into the building. And this is becoming increasingly concerning as there's more remote work. Sometimes employees don't come back to the building for several months.

And then there's new employees who have come in who may not know each other. So in which case the badges don't provide the level of authentication that's necessary and using the faces a more secure manner in this scenario. So what do you think?

The biggest challenge is going to be to get people to wrap their heads around this? Well, we're actually tackling the challenges now. We like I mentioned we've had really great deployment currently protecting over a million employees, but it's really just getting people more comfortable with the technology over time Legacy biometric Solutions have delivered false promises and people have had bad experiences having to chat having the challenge with enrollment having the challenge with the people having to stop at the door to be authenticated and so as they learn about our technology and how easy it really is in this new category that we're creating You See Much More Much Better adoption and a lot of those concerns go away.

All right, folks. Well, you heard it here first. Maybe we don't need those passwords and pins anymore and you can just walk around with the face that you were giving at Birth and gain access to wherever you're supposed to be Tina.

Thanks for being on the show. Mike thanks so much. All right back to you guys in the studio.