63 Days of Summer at UnifyID

Posted on August 14, 2017December 7, 2018 by Joy Tang

60 hours after I wrapped up my second year at UC Berkeley, I walked into the UnifyID office for my first day as a software engineering intern. I was not sure what to expect, but I definitely did not think that before I left that day, I would have already contributed to the codebase! The decision to work at UnifyID was an easy one. This team was working on technology that I believed was the future of security, using implicit authentication to determine what makes you unique, ultimately eliminating passwords.

Throughout the summer, I worked on various projects ranging from Android development to devOps to server backend work. One project I particularly enjoyed working on was the continuous integration for our Android project. It was interesting to understand how the code that was written was built, tested, and deployed through the pipeline, and how it all tied together with Docker and Amazon Web Services. I had never worked in any of these areas before arriving at UnifyID, but with guidance from my mentor, CEO John Whaley, and the incredible support of the other engineers, I was able to directly contribute to the product. I learned something new every day and noticed my growth as a software engineer as the summer progressed.

As a female engineer, I have always noticed the underrepresentation of women in engineering. I constantly wonder what I can do to lessen this gap? From this experience, I have learned that as long as you are passionate about your work and genuinely care about what you are doing, not much can stand in your way. To all my aspiring engineering peers: be inquisitive, be supportive, and a caring community will form.

Impromptu team outing at a SoMa neighborhood cafe!

The team really makes the office feel like a comfortable and enjoyable space to be in. The whole team is so passionate about their work and willing to take time out of their day to share and explain their projects to me. Everyone comes from such different backgrounds and each person is so interesting to talk to and learn from.

As the summer comes to an end, I would like to thank the team at UnifyID for this wonderful learning experience. Nowhere else would I have been able to discuss ideas, designs, and implementations with such qualified people while working on a groundbreaking solution to such a prolific problem.

Recapping our Summer 2017 Internship Program

Posted on August 9, 2017December 7, 2018 by Michael Chien

This summer we ran our largest internship program yet at UnifyID. We hosted an immensely talented group of 16 interns who joined us for 3 months, and there was never a dull day! While bringing in interns for the summer does create an energetic cadence, fresh viewpoints challenge us to grow as a company too. 12 weeks can feel like both a sprint and marathon, but in start-up days, even the hour can be precious.

Almost all our interns mentioned a desire to contribute to the technology of the future when asked why they chose to work at UnifyID, and we think this is a testament to the quality of our internship program—interns are able to contribute their talents in a meaningful way, whether on our machine learning, software engineering, or product teams.

Our machine learning interns focused on research, under the guidance of Vinay Prabhu. Much of their work has been on figuring out how to integrate new factors into our algorithms or develop datasets of human activity for future use. Three of our paper submissions were accepted to ICML workshops to be held in Sydney this year. This brings the total number of peer reviewed research papers accepted or published by UnifyID in the last few weeks to seven! What is especially exciting is the fact that these were the first peer-reviewed papers for our undergraduate interns in what we hope will be long and fruitful research careers.

Our software engineering interns have been integral in supporting our product sprints, which have been centered around deploying initial versions of our technology to our partners quickly. As one of our interns, Joy, said: “From mobile development to server work to DevOps, I learned an insane amount from this incredible team.”

Our product interns were involved across teams and worked on projects varying from product backlog grooming and retrospectives to beta community management to content marketing to analyst relations to technical recruiting to team building efforts. Having worked across multiple facets of the business, they were able to wear many hats and learn a great deal about product development and operations.

Aside from work, there’s no shortage of events to attend in the Bay Area, from informal ones like Corgi Con or After Dark Thursday Nights at the Exploratorium, to events focused on professional development like Internpalooza or a Q&A with Ben Horowitz of a16z, who provided his advice on how to succeed in the tech world. Our interns were also able to take part in shaping our team culture: designing custom t-shirts, going on team picnics, and participating in interoffice competitions and hackathons.

A serendipitous meet up at Norcal Corgi Con!

Though we are sad to see them go, we know that they all have a bright future ahead of them and are so grateful for the time they were able to spend at our company this summer. Thank you to the Summer 2017 class of UnifyID interns!

Mohannad Abu Nassar, senior, MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Divyansh Agarwal, junior, UC Berkeley, Computer Science and Statistics
Michael Chien, sophomore, UC Berkeley, Environmental Economics and Policy
Pascal Gendron, 4th year, Université de Sherbrooke, Electrical Engineering
Peter Griggs, junior, MIT, Computer Science
Aditya Kotak, sophomore, UC Berkeley, Computer Science and Economics
Francesca Ledesma, junior, UC Berkeley, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Nikhil Mehta, senior, Purdue, Computer Science
Edgar Minasyan, senior, MIT, Computer Science and Math
Vasilis Oikonomou, junior, UC Berkeley, Computer Science and Statistics
Joy Tang, junior, UC Berkeley, Computer Science
Issac Wang, junior, UC San Diego, Computer Science
Eric Zhang, junior, UC San Diego, Computer Engineering

Our Pledge to Inclusion and Diversity: 1 Year Later

Posted on July 20, 2017August 6, 2020 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.

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.

Imagine: 1-Click Login Across 500 Websites

Posted on November 16, 2016December 7, 2018 by Grace Chang

Now, imagine seamless authentication everywhere. Software so powerful that by the sensors you already have on your phone, wearables, devices at home or the office, knows it’s you. No more 6-digit pin, string of upper and lowercase letters and numbers to signify that it is really you making a purchase, logging in, or entering a key swipe. Anywhere online or offline where you need to identify yourself, UnifyID promises that based on your everyday actions from factors like how you sit, walk, and type (i.e. passive factors also known as implicit authentication in academia), your “you-ness” can be determined with 99.999% accuracy. At times when the machine learning algorithms are unsure, an active challenge will be triggered on your nearest phone or device (e.g. fingerprint verification, among a dozen others in development).

Active Challenge — The UnifyID iOS active challenge is triggered when the machine learning algorithm requires additional verification to learn that it is really you.

UnifyID has been called the holy grail of authentication because the degree of security and sophistication of its machine learning efforts are unparalleled and the convenience and focus on usability makes trying the product unbelievably easy.

Between now and then, we’re in the stage of private beta–ensuring that the flows are easy and work as expected. UnifyID launched out of stealth at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. The initial sign on, logging out and logging back into sites has gone through more than 25 iterations in a few weeks (thanks to the onsite testers!). We’re ready to move forward to a remote private beta and test outside the bounds of our four-walls.

Join us on this journey to disrupt passwords. While “The Oracle” is still under development (our machine learning algorithms), we are moving full-forward on making sure that at this stage, the UnifyID user flows are easy for everyone to use, many times, everyday, across all sites.

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Sign up for the UnifyID Private Beta: https://unify.id, click “Apply for Private Beta,” enter “Imagination” and why you are interested in participating in the beta in the secret handshake field.