THIS STARTUP IS USING AI TO TRACE COVID-19 PATIENT CONTACTS AT RISK

Veronica Yurchuk and Kosh Shysh founded Traces.ai in Sunnyvale, California last year, when San Francisco and two other cities banned the use of facial recognition in video and still image analysis. Their mission: utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze video using 2000 different attributes of a person, except their face.

One of the team’s motivations for starting traces was to overcome the inherent challenges of using facial recognition to analyze footage.

“It frequently doesn’t work because the angle of a CCTV camera is very specific and can not capture the face with enough definition to really distinguish it from others. We thought we could use every aspect of visual appearance, except faces, to identify criminal suspects,” Yurchuk says.

Traces is intended as a short-term solution, able to track someone within an initial 6-12 hours.  Through computer vision and simple cameras, the technology uses a person’s defining features, as well as their accessories and apparel, while blurring out faces to maintain anonymity and eliminate racial bias. Backpacks, clothing, hair color, height and other descriptive factors, they say, can be just as effective in identifying people. For example, if a child is lost in an amusement park, Traces can be deployed immediately to locate a child based on age, hair and eye color and a short description of what the child is wearing.

The current accuracy rate, the pair say, is 98 percent. I asked Shysh how well Traces works in geographies that are less ethnically diverse, like Japan.

“We had some interesting deployments in Japan with a group of people about the same height all wearing black suits, but their hairstyles and accessories are different. They have different bags and watches and that’s how we could distinguish between people,” Shysh says.

In fact, it was during a trip to Asia where Shysh first came up with the idea for Traces.

“I noticed that in those countries, people wore masks to cope with problems like air pollution. I started questioning, ‘How do they search for lost kids, or suspects?’ I reached out to Veronica for a technical solution and we became co-founders.”

Yurchuk and Shysh are alumnus of seed accelerator, Y Combinator, where they completed an intense program, and were rewarded with substantial funding and influential contacts. The experience, they say, was invaluable, but led to burnout. As an antidote, Yurchuk and Shysh participated in a deceleration program, aptly called Decelera.

Where Y Combinator involved rigorous product development and business modeling in Silicon Valley, Decelera focused on unwinding and connecting – with community and quiet time. The setting for the 10-day program was the W Hotel, a luxury resort in Mayakoba, Mexico, less than an hour’s drive from Cancun. Days began with early morning yoga sessions on a white sandy beach, followed by workshops with hammocks for chairs, one-on-one sessions, group meditations, movie nights under the stars, and a camp-like atmosphere, including zip lining over swimming holes.

It was, says Shysh, a perfect place for he and Yurchuk to reset and restore themselves.

“We had our funding sorted, so we could focus on decompressing and sharing our knowledge with other entrepreneurs.”

With both Y Combinator and Decelera under their belts, Yurchuk and Shysh began targeting customers. They initially envisioned governments would be their key customers, using Traces to identify criminal suspects, but soon learned the bureaucracy-driven delays would slow the pace of their growth. Instead, they began pitching their technology to private sector companies using security firms, and later adapted to meet the demands of clients they hadn’t even anticipated, Yurchuk says.

“Ad industry companies began contacting us to find out how many unique views their billboards got or how many people their ads were exposed to. We were stupid enough to ignore it for about six months, but after some big companies started to approach us, we developed the application for them.”

Like most startups, Traces operates with a small team; developing their product while reacting quickly to new opportunities is often their biggest challenge. Now, the founders are coming full circle as governments around the world are getting in touch to learn how Traces can be used to identify people who have come into contact with virus patients.

“This tech could be deployed very early to trace who came into close proximity with those diagnosed. We’re in talks with Asian governments about using it for contact tracing and there’s the possibility it can be combined with thermal vision not only to track contacts of confirmed cases, but also monitor others based on temperature levels. Our technology is successful if deployed early enough, so cities like London, Tokyo and New York would benefit from contact tracing for other viruses in the future.” Shysh explains.

How does it work? I’ll use the example of a friend who owns an essential manufacturing business. He recently received the news that 50 employees at one of his plants had contracted the virus. Without knowing which members of staff had come into contact with those infected, he was forced to close the plant, temporarily. If he’d had CCTV and Traces, those who came in close proximity could have been identified and isolated, while others could have maintained operations.

Yurchuk and Shysh are offering the service for free to existing customers and continue to adapt Traces to effectively combat the most vital threats, which these days, is more likely to be a virus, than a criminal suspect.

Bertie

Forbes



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