Meta Biometrics: My Voice Is More Than My Password

Nuance-Communications-logo                            Accenture         

 

 A conversation with Peter Mohany CMO Nuance Communications, Susan Hunt VP Federal Nuance Communications, Simon Bisson Freelance Technology Journalist, Richard Mack VP Communications Nuance Communications, Jeanne Harris Managing Director Information Technology Research Accenture Institute for High Performance increase

As the Internet becomes increasingly crowded with personal data and information collection, from amazon to facebook, there is an intensification in the desire to protect ones identify. However, we are challenged by the ability of technology to adequately utilize personalized biometric information to protect personal identity. Additionally, with the increase in cyber crime and computer hackers ability to crack strong case sensitive passwords, there is a growing need for stronger security protection of personal information. Nuance Communications is currently working in the field of telephonic voice recognition and meta biometrics to address these issues and discussed some of the emerging trends and areas they see this field going.

 

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“Enabling Privacy and Making It Pay (with Mobile)”

Moderated by Sébastien Taveau, CTO, Validity

Problem Outline:

Taveau describes privacy with regards to the cloud as existing in 5 realms, or The Rule of 5 P’s for the Cloud. These P’s are described as Personal, Private, Professional, Proprietary and Public clouds.  Part of the modern privacy issue revolves around, in Taveau’s opinion, the bleeding of the first four P’s into the public cloud, or the making public of information over which an individual seeks to maintain control.  How can we maintain a sense of privacy when so many forms of technology and social networking that we use on a regular basis can be made public?

Key points of discussion:

-Europe tends to see freedom as the “freedom from” whereas North America perceives freedom in terms of the “freedom to”.  This is reflected in the emerging European idea of the “Right to disappear”

-Social networks, which are seen by individuals as part of a “private cloud” are regularly infringed upon and made public (think companies firing individuals based on Facebook profiles).

-”We’ve got this bleeding right now between work and personal life.  We used to think in terms of work-life balance, now we have a work-life blend [...] It all seems to be melting together now.”–Mary Branscombe, Freelance Technology Journalist

-”For a long time people have considered the mobile device to be part of the cloud.  What people need to realize is that a mobile device is just a lock, equipped with a natural ID.  You become the key, the phone is the lock, and you use both to access the data on the cloud.  So the recently coined idea that identity is the new money is absolutely correct.”-Sebastian Taveau

-Major tech companies are trying more than ever to move from the Pin and Password security model to more advanced models, because breaches are becoming unsustainable.

-Biometrics are increasing in popularity, and the tech industry is seeking to decentralize the databases that hold the identity information required to secure companies and their workforce.

-Biometrics have the ability to create one-time passwords in order to verify that an individual has checked out on a device without actually placing their identity on the cloud.

-”We have to worry about the number of people who will sign a page to get a free pen.”–Mary Branscombe

-Facebook is “boiling the frog of privacy” so that you get “privacy exhaustion” (Mary Branscombe), and also divides privacy agreements and settings into so many “slices of privacy”(Sebastian Taveau) that you cannot track which peices of information are accessible to the company.

-The issue with security using soon-to-be available technology is that it may require the removal of personal privacy through observation of location (proximity to devices) and biometric verification.  This will make hacking much harder, but will require a sacrifice of convenience, location and biological identity.

It will become important that consumers understand what they are being asked to sacrifice in the name of security.  Mary suggests that “we have trained the monkey to press that button” and that people are already prepared to give up whatever they are asked to.  However, Sebastian notes that companies have a vested interest in attempting to train their clients to more carefully assess these compromises, and that Fido, among others, has actually begun trying to do so.

In summary, there are a number of privacy issues that come with using the cloud.  However, there are possibilities using Biometrics and location services (matching proximity to a device with the personal signal used to access it) to create far more secure templates which verify identity. If the biometric account on a device is set up only in a secure situation (such as a local bank branch, using identity cards etc) that secure template could be maintained and transferred to additional devices by the consumer.  This would allow for a much more secure set of mobile devices and security of private information stored on the cloud, which could only be accessed biometrically.

 

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Building New Human Organs from Stem Cells

A conversation with Tony Blau, Professor of Medicine/Hematology, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences and Co-Director, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, University of Washington; hosted by William Harris, President and CEO, Science Foundation Arizona

Tony Blau on current state of stem cells

Opportunities around Cancer and big data are huge

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CTO Challenge: Achieving Zero Crown-Jewel Intellectual Property Loss

With judges Mark Anderson, Founder and Chair, INVNT/IP; and Steven Sprague, CEO, Wave Systems, and Founding Member, INVNT/IP. 

And CTO task force Barry Briggs, IT Chief Architect and CTO, Microsoft; Ty Carlson, Senior Manager, Technology Program Management, Digital Products Group, Amazon; Jeff Hudson, CEO, Venafi; Pete Nicoletti, Chief Information Security Officer, Virtustream; Eric Openshaw, Vice Chairman and US Technology, Media and Telecommunications Leader, Deloitte LLP; Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego/Irvine Partnership (HQ Qualcomm Institute), UCSD; Vaclav Vincalek, President, Pacific Coast Information Systems Ltd.; and Jerry Woodall, Founder, WoodallTech, and National Medal of Technology Laureate

Mark Anderson: IP theft can and has destroyed global economic sectors. For example, cellular.

How much of global GDP does not depend on IP and proprietary technology? Most global GDP today depends on IP.

Considerations:

If you succeed in solving this problem, you will make world economic history.

Richard Marshall: For the purposes of our discussions this week, legality is irrelevant. Look at technical and policy solutions and be completely unconstrained. “Nothing is off the table as far as I’m concerned.”

Avoid compliance regimes and security. Compliance regimes are a lawyer’s full employment act. Don’t fall into that rabbit hole. Think more of asset management

Steven Sprague: How do we get to the point that it’s a natural part of the process of doing business.

 

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Nuance, Plantronics & Attensity: Taking Voice Digitization Beyond Words

With Peter Mahoney, CMO, Nuance Communications; Cary Bran, Senior Director, Innovation and New Ventures, Plantronics; and Kirsten Bay, President and CEO, Attensity Group; hosted by Stephen Socolof, Managing Partner, New Venture Partners

Peter Mahoney: Nuance has much broader world-view than voice recognition and voice synthesis. They are reinventing the relationship between people and technology. Motion, gesture, context, personalization are all required for smarter systems.

Carey Bran: Plantronics is focused on letting developers integrate into their audio devices, which can be fed into speech recognition technologies; enabling technologies and integrating more and more sensors to enable easier, more intuitive experiences.

Kirsten Bay:  As sentiments move into digital, sentiment is lost. The future is being able to reintegrate sentiment into digital.

 

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ARM’s EVP: The Chips to Power the Next Digital Planet

With Tom Lantzsch, Executive Vice President of Strategy, ARM Inc.; hosted by Robert F. Anderson, Director, Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property, Illinois Institute of Technology

Lantzsch says ARM is working on a long-scale timeline that gives it a unique ability to see the future of technology.

The server problem: Every 600 smartphones drive demand for 1 server. That number drops to about 125 for iPads. That’s driving a huge need for power.

On security, technology isn’t the problem. ARM already has the hardware-based security that everyone’s talking about, but no one’s using it. The real challenge will be who gets to decide who can see and access information.

The next digital planet? Focusing on adaptive learning, closed loop, pervasive computing system. 

Intelligent driving systems are here today: Google car actually avoids blind spots, Mercedes slams on the brakes if something runs in front of you. We’ll see more and more of this, moving from cars that are safe in accidents to those that don’t get into accidents at all.

3D transistor structures are becoming mainstream at the most advanced side of conductor industry. That will be around for 2-4 generations of applied technology.

Semiconductor design is moving away from everything on a CPU core, which is leading to heterogeneous computing: Multiple blocks on a chip that allow us to drive down power.

China’s unwritten rule: Agriculture will produce 600 million unemployed farmers as technology advances farming.

One Laptop per Child is now an institution. It’s called a smartphone. They cost $50.

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Vint Cerf on Internet Authentication, Pseudonymity and Resilience

With Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist, Google; hosted by Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego/Irvine Partnership (HQ Qualcomm Institute), UCSD

“They’ve run out of prizes to give Vint, so Queen Elizabeth actually had to invent a prize to give Vint,” quips Larry Smarr.

If you were to design the Internet all over again, what would you do differently?

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Massive Increases in Data: Fragmentation, Concentration and Economic Impact

With John Hagel III, Director and Co-Chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge LLP; and Eric Openshaw, Vice Chairman and US Technology, Media and Telecommunications Leader, Deloitte LLP

John Hagel addresses the impacts of big data at Future in Review.

John Hagel addresses the impacts of big data at Future in Review.

John Hagel asks, What are the structural implications of big data? Will we all become independent contractors or will this concentrate talent? 

Eric Openshaw says that the securitization of big data and disruptive opportunities keeps him awake every night.

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Data Visualization on Massive Scales

A conversation with Chris Johnson, Director, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and Distinguished Professor, School of Computing University of Utah; and Bob Bishop, Founder and President, ICES Foundation and past CEO, Silicon Graphics; hosted by Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego Irvine Partnership (HD Qualcomm Institute), UCSD.

 

ICES Foundation- Bob Bishop

ICES Foundation is working to integrate all the sciences that apply to the planet and create predictability. The challenge is going from analytics into discovery, and then support. The data is so big, it’s hard to come to grips with unless you consolidate thru geoformat. Dynamic interactive visualization can be used to understand all of the big data at hand.

You can use all this data to build an Earth System Model, to look at everything from the ocean atmosphere to the solar system.
The whole solar system is talking to itself and is interconnected. ICES has satellites that are monitoring the Earth’s magnetosphere in real time. Visualization is the only way you can possibly understand all the information at our hands.

In the future, Bishop would like to see a more complete climate analysis with these newly coupled visualization systems.

 

Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah- Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson has been using scientific visualization to study the complexity of the inner body and much more. The ability to see things at high resolutions for the first time, and the ability to see them in a time dependent interactive way instead of a play back way, gives scientists insight they need to progress forward.

New technologies, such as high performance computing, high resolution walls, new hardware and software, and algorithms open up fresh ways for science to be viewed and applied to solve problems that previously couldn’t be solved.

Some of the projects Johnson and the Institute are working on include:

-Creating personalized patient dependent models of the body and their function (ie. computational models of the heart and simulations of the activity to create modeling in the field)

-Real time seeing during surgery of the body

-Cultural Heritage: the Digital Michelangelo Project (scanned the entire “David” statue with lasers, to yield almost a billion triangles to visualize the statue. The product? An amazingly high resolution that is essentially a perfect copy of the statue.

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Digitizing the Planet: Announcing a new open global data portal

A conversation with Patrick Hogan, Project Lead, NASA World Wind; and Kevin Montgomery, CEO, Intelesense Technologies; hosted by Mark Anderson

World Wind

Announcing the Open Beta release of Collaborate.org exclusively for FiRe members

Kevin Montgomery announces the Open Beta of Collaborate.org at FiRe 2013.

Kevin Montgomery announces the Open Beta of Collaborate.org at FiRe 2013.

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