Tag: community

Ready…Set…Hack!

Posted on by Jessica Lin

HackMIT: Hack to the Future

In the past couple of months, UnifyID has been busy attending university hackathons at MIT and UC Berkeley. What this means is hours and hours of non-stop hacking, but it also means unlimited snacks, mini midnight workouts, and lots of young, passionate coders working to create impactful projects.

John poses with a16z representative Nigel at HackMIT.
On September 16, John Whaley flew to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend HackMIT: Hack to the Future where he had the opportunity to meet more than 1500 students from all different universities. Representing a16z, John participated in a fireside chat where he covered a variety of topics including what it’s like to work in a startup, choosing industry versus graduate school, and building a company on machine learning. He discussed the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, team-building, fundraising, and more, as students picked his brain about technical topics and career advice. Later, John was able to speak more in depth during his tech talk about UnifyID and identifying individuals based on gait. Students were deeply interested in the problem UnifyID is trying to solve as well as the impact and intellectual aspect of UnifyID’s approach to the issue.

Aside from his fireside chat and tech talk, John had the opportunity to mentor hackers in their own projects. His favorite part was meeting and interacting with all of the students, seeing their ambition, passion, and genuine interest in the projects that they were working on. He also enjoyed the intense energy in the arena, choosing to stay and mentor hackers until 3am.

After 24 hours of hard work and non stop hacking at MIT, many groups of students presented their projects. Projects covered a wide range of topics from virtual reality games to homework-help mobile applications. Even though John had been to plenty of hackathons in the past, he was still amazed by the caliber and level of innovation that the students were able to reach in their projects. The first place prize ended up going to a group of students who created Pixelator, “a simple product that sharpens blurry images without a lot of code.”

Cal Hacks 4.0

A few weeks later, on October 6, Andres Castaneda crossed the Bay to attend Cal Hacks 4.0 at the UC Berkeley Stadium. With nearly 1500 students listening, he gave a presentation about UnifyID’s Android SDK and API, receiving a positive response from students who believed it was a revolutionary idea. Similar to John at MIT, Andres also had the opportunity to mentor up-and-coming hackers. For 36 hours, he helped students solve technical challenges as they competed for over $100,000 in prizes, including UnifyID’s contribution: a $300 Amazon giftcard and a Rick and Morty card game.

Based on the level of positive impact, innovation, and technical difficulty, the winning hack for UnifyID’s prize was Safescape, a mobile application that analyzes real-time news articles and alerts people in areas of “non-safe” events. It uses UnifyID’s Android SDK to validate individuals on the application. Inspired by the recent natural and terror crises occurring globally, Safescape also provides those in danger with potential escape routes, allows them to alert others around them, and contains a simple way to contact loved ones.

Andres’ favorite part about participating in Cal Hacks was “seeing people build a product from 0 to 1 in 36 hours.” He also found it hilarious that many students brought sleeping bags and threw them on the floor for intermittent opportunities to take naps.

Andres poses with mentees and previous UnifyID interns Aditya and Michael.

UnifyID is a strong supporter of hackathons because they provide great opportunities to connect with university students. Witnessing the high caliber of work accomplished at these events, UnifyID is inspired by young hackers who are truly passionate about making an impact in the world. These students represent a large diversity of talent from all different schools and backgrounds and are able to demonstrate what students are interested in nowadays. Additionally, hackathons allow UnifyID the chance to give back to the community. They are not only learning opportunities for up-and-coming hackers, but they also help UnifyID to understand how to cater to students’ interests and needs. After 2 hackathons in the span of one month, UnifyID is channeling its focus back to the day-to-day for now; however, we cannot wait for the next one!

Our Pledge to Inclusion and Diversity: 1 Year Later

Posted on by Michael Chien

Lack of diversity in tech has been a long-standing problem, but in recent months it’s become increasingly apparent that inclusion is more than an aspirational need. Diversity is the DNA that creates robust, flourishing environments primed for tough conversations and progressive thinking at UnifyID.

Last June, UnifyID was one of 33 companies that signed the White House Tech Inclusion Pledge on the eve of President Obama’s Global Entrepreneurship Innovation Summit 2016 to ensure that our employees reflect the diverse nature of the American workforce.

Although UnifyID is a small startup, we still want to lead in all areas of our business—and diversity is no exception. As an inaugural signatory of this agreement, the first of its kind, we proudly reaffirm our commitment to being an industry leader in promoting inclusion for all.

Our team on a normal day in the office.

The pledge was three-part, with the central aim of increasing representation of underrepresented groups:

“Implement and publish company-specific goals to recruit, retain, and advance diverse technology talent, and operationalize concrete measures to create and sustain an inclusive culture.”

This was a task we have invested significant time and effort into accomplishing, particularly in our recruitment operations. Many job seekers and experts alike have criticized the inconsistent process around the technical interview, noting its irrelevance to the workplace and its unnecessary biases against women. Taking into account these guidelines from Code2040, a collaborating organization of the Tech Inclusion Pledge, we’ve created a low stress, context-relevant, and fun language-agnostic technical challenge to improve the non-biased screening in our recruiting process.

“Annually publish data and progress metrics on the diversity of our technology workforce across functional areas and seniority levels.”

It is important to us that we are transparent about our gender, racial, and ethnic data because diversity and inclusion is a core part of our company mission to be authentic, be yourself. As such, this report is our first attempt at this, and we hope to make future updates more frequently.

On our team, 70 percent are people of color and 24 percent are women. Immigrants make up a significant part of the American workforce, and we are also proud to call UnifyID the workplace of immigrants who collectively represent 17 nationalities (including our interns). Paulo, one of our machine learning engineers, has quipped, “the office sometimes feels like a Model UN conference!” While our size makes us unable to release more detailed breakouts (we respect employee privacy), we will continue to release diversity data in a timely and transparent fashion.

“Invest in partnerships to build a diverse pipeline of technology talent to increase our ability to recognize, develop and support talent from all backgrounds.”

Here in the Bay Area, we are surrounded by terrific organizations that support underrepresented groups in tech, and we’ve been fortunate to be involved in these events. Some of these events include the Out for Undergrad (O4U) annual Tech Conference, which allowed us to connect with many high-achieving LGBTQ+ undergraduates from across the country, as well as the Y Combinator-hosted Female Founders Conference, or even SF Pride last month!

Our head of Product, Grace Chang, at last year’s Out for Undergrad (O4U) Tech Conference!

Diversity strengthens us as a company and as a country, so this remains one of our foremost priorities as we continue to grow (we’re hiring) and we hope to see improvement in our workplace and in the industry as a whole. We are thrilled that today, the number of companies that have signed the pledge has risen to 80.

We encourage more companies to sign this Tech Inclusion Pledge here.

UnifyID Anoints 16 Distinguished Scientists for the AI Fellowship

Posted on by Grace Chang

Fast Growing Startup Uses Machine Learning to Solve Passwordless Authentication

Today, UnifyID, a service that can authenticate you based on unique factors like the way you walk, type, and sit, announced the final 16 fellows selected for its inaugural Artificial Intelligence Fellowship for the Fall of 2016. Each of the fellows have shown exemplary leadership and curiosity in making a meaningful difference in our society and clearly has an aptitude for making sweeping changes in this rapidly growing area of AI.

Of the company’s recent launch and success at TechCrunch Disrupt, claiming SF Battlefield Runner-Up (2nd in 1000 applicants worldwide), UnifyID CEO John Whaley said, “We were indeed overwhelmed by the amazing response to our first edition of the AI Fellowship and the sheer quality of applicants we received. We also take immense pride in the fact that more than 40% of our chosen cohort will be women, which further reinforces our commitment as one of the original 33 signees of the U.S. White House Tech Inclusion Pledge.”

The final 16 fellows hail from Israel, Paris, Kyoto, Bangalore, and cities across the U.S. with Ph.D., M.S., M.B.A., and B.S. degrees from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, NYU-CIMS, UCLA, Wharton, among other top institutions.

  • Aidan Clark triple major in Math, Classical Languages and CS at UC Berkeley
  • Anna Venancio-Marques Data Scientist in Residence, PhD École normale supérieure
  • Arik Sosman Software Engineer at BitGo, 2x Apple WWDC scholar, CeBIT speaker

  • Baiyu Chen Convolutional Neural Network Researcher, Masters in CS at UC Berkeley

  • Fuxiao Xin Lead Machine Learning Scientist at GE Global Research, PhD Bioinformatics

  • Kathy Sohrabi VP Engineering, IoT and sensors, MBA at Wharton, PhD EE at UCLA

  • Kazu Komoto Chief Robotics Engineer, CNET Writer, Masters in ME at Kyoto University

  • Laura Florescu Co-authored Asymptopia, Mathematical Reviewer, PhD CS at NYU

  • Lorraine Lin Managing Director, MFE Berkeley, PhD Oxford, Masters Design Harvard
  • Morgan Lai AI Scientist, MIT Media Lab, Co-founder/CTO, M.Eng. CS at MIT

  • Pushpa Raghani Post Doc Researcher at Stanford and IBM, PhD Physics at JNCASR

  • Raul Puri Machine Learning Development at Berkeley, BS EE/CS/Bioeng at Berkeley
  • Sara Hooker Data Scientist, Founder non-profit, educational access in rural Africa

  • Siraj Raval Data Scientist, the Bill Nye of Computer Science on YouTube

  • Wentao Wang Senior New Tech Integration Engineer at Tesla, PhD ME at MIT

  • Will Grathwohl Computer Vision Specialist, Founder/Chief Scientist, BS CSAIL at MIT

 

This highly selective, cross-disciplinary program covers the following areas:

  • Deep Learning
  • Signal Processing
  • Optimization Theory
  • Sensor Technology
  • Mobile Development
  • Statistical Machine Learning
  • Security and Identity
  • Human Behavior

Our UnifyID AI Fellows will get to choose from one of 16 well-defined projects in the broad area of applied artificial intelligence in the context of solving the problem of seamless personal authentication. The Fellows will be led by our esteemed Fellowship Advisors, renown experts in machine learning and PhDs from CMU, Stanford, and University of Vienna, Austria.

Please welcome our incoming class! ✨

 

Read the original UnifyID AI Fellowship Announcement:

https://unify.id/2016/10/10/announcing-the-unifyid-ai-fellowship/

 

Initial Release:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/unifyid/prweb13804371.htm#!

UnifyID Disrupts Disrupt!

Posted on by Grace Chang

We’ve never been one to shy away from making our own path, and if we hear that it’s never been done that way before, we’re eager to try. Courage is in our DNA and gives us the freedom to pursue challenge without inhibitions. We’re humbled to be named TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield Runner-Up as we launch out of stealth, but we’re even more excited to eliminate passwords forever.

Many thanks to our supporters. We have read every tweet, Facebook post, article, article comment, and secret handshake 🙂

Photo by Oren Haskins

And for those who would like to take this disruptive journey behind Disrupt, sign up for our private beta today at Unify.ID (“Apply for Private Beta” with PTCD and why you’d like to enlist).

Photo by Oren Haskins

We encourage everyone to spread the good word on UnifyID.

Photo by Oren Haskins

We are actively hiring and based in SoMa, San Francisco.

Photo by Oren Haskins

We recognize the importance of diversity in the workplace and actively celebrate what makes each individual unique.

Photo by Oren Haskins

We’re on a mission to change the world and build a revolutionary identity platform based on implicit authentication to make your security seamless.