How AI Can Protect Physical Objects in the Real World with Jakub Krcmar

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Jakub Krcmar is the CEO & Co-founder at Veracity Protocol. Jakub has worked on 200+ web and mobile products as a UX/UI professional, Director, and Head of Product, leading teams for clients like World Press Photo, UNICEF, Amnesty Int. He’s used to leading 10+ teams on complex tasks while setting the vision. Jakub is native in cutting-edge technologies. Prior to Veracity Protocol He co-founded ONEPROVE (now part of VP) and Stellar Bold. He was also a Partner & CPO at ARTSTAQ. Previously, 

Episode Links:  

Jakub Krcmar’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubkrcmar/ 

Jakub Krcmar’s Twitter: @jakubkrcmar 

Jakub Krcmar’s Website: https://www.veracityprotocol.org/ 

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Outline: 

Here’s the timestamps for the episode: 

(00:00) – Introduction

(01:52) – At Veracity, we developed an algorithm based on computer vision and artificial intelligence, which basically enables any camera, be it a smartphone camera or industrial camera to be able to analyze any object’s physical structure, and create something that we call tamper-proof physical code. Any physical object itself is unique.

(02:49) – Using this physical code to basically solve the issues of authenticity of manipulation to help detect any anomalies or tampering and to really protect human lives and brands and national security and allow for a fully automated, digitized, tokenized future world and industry 4.0

(04:21) – The upcoming era of blockchain and a lot of companies using blockchain as something to track provenance, for example, is another duplication of how we are using physical certificates of authenticity. Even blockchain itself is a very cool technology of decentralized databases. It cannot secure what is essential, which is the way you connect the physical object itself to any digital entry, be it a database or blockchain. So this is a key technology to not only some issues of today, like the counterfeiting and transparency, but also of tomorrow to enable the optimized industry. 

(07:34) – Techstars was a milestone,which through their process, pushed us to literally get our stuff together and really be precise about how we want to use this technology, what market we want to target and get everything together.

(09:25) – We started from Czech Republic, from the middle of Europe, going to New York, where we have most clients, most engagements. Also the business opportunities, because one of the verticals we are focusing on is semiconductors. Taiwan is the place where most of the semiconductors are produced. And that’s why it’s also become strategically important globally.

(12:28) – We obviously are not focusing only on semiconductors, there’s two other areas, collectibles and sports memorabilia is a big one, luxury goods and also security documents like IDs and passports. The overarching team is really like objects or items of high value or high security threat. There’s security issues of software angle and hardware angle. And software angles you can always fix. But the hardware angle is unfixable until you actually replace and fix that thing physically.

(15:53) – Our position was never to have the role of saying this is authentic and this is not. Our position is to provide a technology where you can protect that painting. And we can always guarantee this is that painting, which has been protected there in that time. We won’t be able to tell if this is the original Rothko. That’s up to the person who’s protecting it. For some reason you may be wanting to even protect the fake. That’s really not our position to judge. This really brings you the identity to be sure.

(16:55) – We are not really focusing on the art sector anymore. That outward is a market, which is very resistant to innovation, to changes or other people want to keep the status quo. And that’s not really a market where we would like to grow a company and innovate.

(19:57) – I don’t even believe you should be doing the authentication as the customer. I believe that should be the role of the marketplace protecting you and doing this authentication for you.I would much rather engage the level higher and bring technology to marketplaces, to work with brands, to work with manufacturers and to be able to totally mitigate this and solve this issue. I believe it’s possible. 

(24:12) – This is the era of when we start having deep fakes in video and audio, it’s kind of a subject going on. The same thing happens with physical objects. You have super fakes that are really impossible, even by a naked eye, to distinguish the details. You really need to be drawing, training your nets and computer vision to really be able to go down and recognize the difference between the fake and original through optimization and AI, increase the accuracy of the process and be able to scale it.

(27:05) – To give you a comparison of what’s the level of detail we can work with, what we can really recognize is a sheet of white paper against each other.

(29:24) – You can take your phone, snap a picture and know immediately. All this is truly based, not only a lack of building this computation algorithm, but also the data sets and the data, and all this data we had to acquire by ourselves.

(31:31) – Every object, the 3D printer prints will be different. Its structure will always be different. It just depends how deep you need to look, how much resolution you need. 

(34:15) – Right now in the RSA constraints, we’re presenting a solution together with Intel of securing the transparent supply chain for the critical hardware, several motherboards, showing the solution, how we are able to fingerprint individual components, several motherboards, to be able to allow anyone down the supply chain to verify this is the authentic motherboard, what’s actually its history. Build the industry 4.0, with automated factories, where components and final products are tokenized and everything is settled on blockchain.

(36:54) – Security is definitely moving more into the physical world and getting much more attention there, because, thanks to the democratization of technology these times, 3D printing, the availability of chips, this brings further pressure to create barriers of entry to bad actors in the supply chains, which you really need to counter with more advanced technology. 

(38:53) – Ever since moving into the cloud with upcoming 5G, everything will be in some instant. The verification down with a smartphone with our technology will be instantaneous.