aiThenticate Computervision Labs, a company established as a joint venture by the University of Johannesburg, has announced that they have developed ground-breaking technology that simulates human cognition. The tech, which works off a smart phone, has brought authentication technology to the next level.
The technology, called aiDX, was developed by aiThenticate computervision scientists to answer one of the most difficult, challenging and urgent questions of our time: “Who is someone… actually?”
André Immelman, CEO of aiThenticate Computervisio Lads, when speaking about the latest innovation said that, “With identity theft now representing the foremost white collar crime in the world, fuelled largely by the exponential growth in mobile communications, this technology has been engineered as the next generation authentication technology.”
The failure of conventional authentication methods such as signature, identity artefacts, passwords, PINs, etc to effectively arrest identity theft, has seen a rapid shift towards biometrics as a means of authenticating a person over recent years: fingerprints, faceprints, voiceprints, irisprints, etc.
“Last year, the global loss from identity theft was about $2 trillion, and it is doubling every year. In South Africa alone, R1 billion was lost in SIM card swaps last year. These figures go to show just how ineffective conventional biometrics is in the post-9/11 world where someone sitting at his PC in one country is able to hack into a bank account in another country, even on a completely different continent.”
“Conventional biometrics are based on simple geometry: connecting key features to form a pattern that is then associated with a particular individual – it’s a bit like a child’s game of ‘connect the dots’ to form a picture. However, while conventional biometrics may be sufficient for the purposes of unlocking a smart phone, the scarcity of key features that are generally visible in a latent fingerprint or a faceprint, for example, means that this system tends to fail rapidly with larger population groups. The simple mathematics that underscore conventional biometrics explains why misidentification is a very real problem with fingerprint, faceprint, voiceprint and irisprint solutions, rendering conventional biometrics inadequate as a real-world authentication solution.”
For that reason, aiThenticate Computervision Labs turned to deep science for an answer to the all-important “Who?” question. Using proprietary algorithms that simulate human cognition, aiThenticate computervision scientists have successfully managed to develop the next generation of authentication technologies.
“The human brain simply operates at a much deeper, far more advanced level than what is possible with conventional authentication methods. Extensive field tests have shown that, as the next generation authentication technology, aiDX eclipses, and in fact, surpasses the overall performance of conventional authentication methods by a factor of some 20x on average*.”
Making the technology universally accessible, aiDX can be deployed on any device that’s equipped with a digital camera, including the one device we all carry with us all the time: a standard, off-the-shelf Android or iOS smartphone or tablet. “aiDX makes it possible to do what conventional authentication methods are simply not able to do under the rigours of real-world conditions: answer the ‘who’ question accurately and conveniently.”
Immelman likens this technology innovation to the disruptive nature of Uber and Skype, which have displaced established conventions and changed the way the world travels and communicates. “We anticipate that it will have applications in a wide variety of industries and market sectors, including financial services, access control, identity management, e-commerce, authorisations, grants, law enforcement, and much more – in fact any situation where the ‘who’ question is fundamentally important.”
Staff Writer
