Santosh PandaThis blog post contains Q &A with Panos Moutafis, CEO, Zenus on how face recognition technology can be used to improve your event.
Q & A with Panos
About Panos:
Panos Moutafis has eight years of experience in face recognition, and he is the CEO of Zenus. He received his B.Sc. in Statistics from the Athens University of Economics & Business in Greece, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Houston. He has a dozen publications in leading journals and conferences along with a book chapter in Face Recognition Across the Imaging Spectrum. His distinctions include the IEEE Homeland Security Conference Biometrics, Forensics, and Physical Security best paper award. He serves on the advisory board at the Lone Star College and enjoys offering talks to schools about careers in science and technology.
About Zenus:
We are leaders in face recognition tech. Zenus facial recognition software allows event planners to identify attendees by searching a database of faces in real-time.
How does Zenus help event?
Panos: So the main thing has to do with the on-site registration and making the check-in process easier faster and more secure, you know controlling access wherever you want. The second thing has to do with analytics. You want to understand how people are feeling at your event venue, you want to know what works for them and so forth.
So these are the two main categories that we work on improving and helping event partners.
How long you been doing?
Panos: I have been working myself in face recognition for over eight years. Now, I got my Ph.D. And, we started focusing on the events industry about two or three years ago. And since then we have been growing very nicely on many use cases.
What triggered you do think the event is one of the use cases for your endeavor?
Panos: Sure, there are many very different applications. You can apply it banking or financial transactions, security surveillance. We saw a very high response rate from the events industry because registration is always a pain-point according to all surveys from lots of different companies.
The on-site registration is always a pain point, and the second big thing is the analytics, a lot of the registration ticketing companies have a lot of insights everything after events. But on the event day, there’s a small gap when it comes to the actual deed, for the event organizers to optimize the on-site experience.
How does it work?
Panos: Zenus API can be easily integrated with event registration/ ticketing platforms. One the day of the event, at your entry, you can switch on a tablet or a smartphone to capture the image as attendee walks-in and Zenus matches with a previously uploaded image of the attendee, they are checked-in when matches.
We also have a quality score for the photo that is uploaded. It’s a good picture, and it’s green.
How about the cost?
Panos: You might see an RFID Solutions / NFC, those costs several dollars per attendee. In Zenus case, the cost is a few cents per attendee,
How secure is your privacy?
Panos: Now, one of our values is protecting people’s privacy. So everything we built everything, we have privacy by design. We don’t receive any first name, last name, and email address.
When we get the pictures on the cloud, we process it, we delete a photo, and we’ll keep the biometric data for the duration of the event.
Everything is on the device, processed, immediately discarded, it’s never stored. The only thing we store is high-level statistics so we can show analytics on the dashboard.
How many events you deploy face recognition technology?
Panos: We have done over 100 events all over the world. And this is increasing significantly.
I see sometimes the event organizers hesitate more than the attendees. Attendees have been using the photo on social media, cell phone, and professional networks. Therefore the trend is shifting to face recognition technology to go mainstream.
Are you planning to deploy face recognition in your next event? Talk to us at Explara for simplifying your start to end, all event tech needs.
You can find more about Zenus Face Recognition technology in our recorded webinar, and also learn more with Zenus case studies.
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