Authority Magazine Declares “The Future is Now” in Interview with VIA’s CEO Colin Gounden

/ /by

Staying true to the mission of Authority Magazine, a publication “​​devoted to sharing in-depth, and interesting interviews, featuring people who are authorities in Business, Pop Culture, Wellness, Social Impact, and Tech,” Fotis Georgiadis selected VIA’s CEO Colin Gounden for an in-depth interview.

The interview, shared on Medium, covers Colin’s personal experiences in his career, including the most interesting story and what movement he would inspire, and most importantly, the cutting edge technological breakthroughs at VIA:

The biggest technological breakthrough our team at VIA is currently working on is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). I think that when we look back 20 years from now, ZKPs will be seen as one of the biggest innovations of our time.

Colin also takes a deep-dive into the incredible work going on at VIA related to Web3 and gives his 60-second VC pitch:

VIA’s been in Web 3 (blockchain and smart contracts) for more than 5 years. We’re just hitting the inflection point for really big adoption (single digit millions to double digit millions). We’ll make investors look brilliant for backing our growth to get to that $Bn+ valuation mark and, at the same time, doing it with a terrific sustainability mission.

For the full interview, visit Authority Magazine’s post on Medium.

Values, Mission, Diversity, and … Pull Requests!

/ /by

One of VIA’s core values is: learning never goes out of style. We believe that real learning (e.g., a new instrument, a new sport, a new programming language) requires feedback from others.

At VIA, we use a common process of pull requests to review code. That is, no individual, no matter what role or how senior, can submit their code to a repo without having it first reviewed by someone else. 

But, how do you give feedback directly and also respectfully? This is an example of living two VIA values: Learning never goes out of style and Respect a challenge and challenge with respect. Balancing directness and respect is especially important in a remote working world, where an increasing portion of interactions may be virtual (e.g., on Slack), which doesn’t include any context or body language cues.

Consider the following comment: “Interesting. Why did you code this way?”

Is the commenter genuinely interested in knowing why? Is it a rhetorical question actually implying that it’s wrong? You can’t tell from the note. You also can’t guarantee how it will be interpreted by the reader.

You could provide more context, but that’s work and even then something can get misinterpreted.

So … At VIA, we use four words to help disambiguate these scenarios and save time. 

VIA VOCAB WORD MEANING
Optional “Nice! Here’s an alternative. No pressure. There are always multiple ways to solve a problem.”
Curiosity “This rocks! How did you come up with this?”
Required “Dude, this has to change.”
Future “Not right now. Let’s come back to this later.”

The result? Clear feedback, succinct communication, and no emotional damage.

This is critically important at a hugely diverse company like VIA. We have team members right out of academia, folks from industry with little academic training, folks from numerous nationalities, and 86% of our technical team speak at least one language other than English. 

“These “VIA vocab” words are meant to move us beyond seeking diversity at work to getting diversity to work. With this approach, we have a better chance of achieving the intended impact of diversity like an increased pace of innovation.”

Consistent with VIA’s mission to enable cleaner, safer, and more equitable communities, we are “open sourcing” our VIA vocab in hopes of encouraging others to make diversity work for them.

You can find a summary and example on GitHub.

VIA’s Will Chapman Invited to Present at Cooperative Technologies Conference & Expo (CTCE)

/ /by

VIA’s Energy Solutions Lead, Will Chapman, has been invited to speak on the opening day of the Cooperative Technologies Conference and Expo hosted by North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives. His session titled, “Introduction to the Global Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™)” will take place on Tuesday, August 9th at 2:15pm ET and will give attendees an overview of the value of the GDAC™ program. For more information on the event, visit: https://tinyurl.com/2dfnff74 

Transformer Tuesday: Using GDAC™ to Learn from a Trailblazing Utility

/ /by

This is the fifth installment of our new blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you today by VIA’s SVP, Strategic Initiatives, Joe Babiec. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.

Last week’s Transformer Tuesday post by my colleague, Will Chapman, highlighted the way GDAC™ member utilities can learn from each other’s experiences. In particular, joining GDAC™ can help a utility prepare for challenges that they haven’t yet had to solve for or frequently experienced in their own transformer fleet. This shared knowledge not only helps utilities learn from each other, but can also help save on costly transformer failures.

This week, we want to highlight the value a specific GDAC™ member, Hawaiian Electric, brings to the entire collaborative. 

Hawaiian Electric is one of GDAC™’s founding member utilities. The company serves 95% of Hawaiʻi’s 1.4 million residents on the islands of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi Island, Maui, Lānaʻi, and Molokaʻi.

Hawaiian Electric has been referred to in the industry as a “postcard from the future.” With very high levels of distributed solar penetration, they are rapidly transforming their grid to provide 100% renewable energy by 2045. Hawaiian Electric has already accumulated considerable experience dealing with a host of unprecedented challenges related to clean energy that many in the industry will not face for several years. Utility Dive recognized Hawaiian Electric’s trailblazing efforts and named the company “Utility of the Year.”

Hawaiian Electric has been contributing valuable insights on substation transformers to the collaborative since 2019. Having their experience included in GDAC™’s many benchmarks allows other utilities to better anticipate how their transformers might behave and how long they might last, as a result of accelerating clean energy technology adoption in their service areas.

In addition to enabling valuable benchmarking, Hawaiian Electric, like other GDAC™ members, is sharing their hard-won operational insights during VIA-hosted GDAC™ workshops. Topics often include fleet management practices, plans, and challenges, as well as the future GDAC™ enhancements that would provide the most value to all utilities.

Hawaiian Electric illustrated the value of the collaborative best themselves:

“Like most electric utilities, Hawaiian Electric does its best to maximize use of grid infrastructure, some of which are nearing the end of their practical use,” said Rick Pinkerton, Director, Asset Management at Hawaiian Electric. “As we modernize our grid, we’re always looking for ways to improve our decision making. We joined GDAC™ to learn from other members and from VIA’s expertise in AI and machine learning, to improve our capabilities to prudently manage the performance, risk, and cost of our fleet of substation transformers, and other T&D assets in general.”

If you would like to learn about how GDAC™ can help your utility to “future proof” by learning from the experience of trailblazing companies like Hawaiian Electric, reach out to me on LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to set up some time to chat and get a free analysis of your most at risk transformers.

InsideHook Highlights VIA CEO Colin Gounden’s Insights About Web3

/ /by

Kirk Miller of InsideHook took a deep dive into Web3 in his latest article, “The Answers to All Your Not-So-Stupid Questions About Web 3.0”. Through expert interviews, the article delivers insights including how Web3 will change our day-to-day to the kinds of companies that will thrive in this new environment.

VIA’s CEO Colin Gounden, gave his thoughts on the power of Web3:

“In 2004, James Surowiecki published a book called The Wisdom of Crowds — the basic premise is that many non-experts are smarter than a few experts,” says Colin Gounden, CEO of VIA, a blockchain-based Web3 platform for privacy-protected data analysis. “Surowiecki had collected incredible and well-researched examples ranging from guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar at a county fair to locating a lost U.S. Navy submarine. Businesses that are willing to leverage Web3 to harness the wisdom of crowds rather than rely on the expertise of a few are going to benefit the most from Web3.”

For the full article, visit the InsideHook website.

Transformer Tuesday: Overcoming Barriers to Collaborative Learning

/ /by

This is the third installment of our new blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you by VIA’s Will Chapman. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.

Aging electric grid components threaten the reliable, safe delivery of electricity. With substation transformer costs ranging anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $5 million, the decision to replace these assets requires careful long-term capital investment planning. Unexpected transformer failures can upset those plans and requesting regulators to revise a utility’s rate case is not quick or guaranteed.

Here is an example of a situation that can arise when a transformer fails suddenly. If, say, Transformer 1 fails, a utility can decide to redeploy funds originally planned for the replacement of Transformer 2 into emergency purchasing of a brand new, Transformer 3. The result of this decision is that the utility needs to find a way to extend the lifespan of Transformer 2 since funds allocated to replace this transformer have gone to purchasing a new one.

So, how do utilities typically solve dilemmas like these and others?

Performing consistent maintenance is a sensible approach because aging transformers can have their lifespan extended, and it helps to defer replacement spending. To guide their maintenance work, utilities turn to predictive analytics to detect which transformers are at the greatest risk of failure. There are some helpful analytics that exist in the marketplace, however, there is a catch to predictive analytics: to be effective, they need a sufficient amount of data about transformers during normal periods of operation and leading up to faults and failure events.

Events like substation transformer failures don’t happen frequently (thankfully). But, utilities with too few failure events may not have a sufficient amount of transformer data on their own to train accurate predictive models, like Utility A on the left of the diagram below.

In principle, Utility A could address this challenge of data scarcity by exchanging data with other utilities so each utility has enough data to train and apply their predictive models and benchmarks, as shown on the chart to the right above. However, in practice, sharing sensitive operational data with other organizations presents serious privacy and security risks. Even if those risks are managed, utilities often keep their data in different or even incompatible formats. Utilities can find themselves needing so much time accessing and preparing data for analysis that they lack timely insights or have to abandon predictive analysis altogether.

VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) overcomes these problems.

The Bridge to Predictive Insights

GDAC™ solves for each of the obstacles mentioned above: data scarcity, data privacy and security risks, and different data formats. With GDAC™, each utility retains complete control of its data and is able to connect to utility-controlled data locations. The collaborative does this by establishing a secure, privacy-protecting bridge between each company’s data and GDAC™ predictive analytics.

Leveraging GDAC™, utilities can prevent unanticipated transformer failures by:

  • Predicting the future lifespan of individual transformers 3 years in advance and transformer fleets 10 years in advance
  • Identifying the contributing factor(s) for health condition changes in order to take the appropriate course of action to extend the life of an asset
  • Comparing individual transformers against the collaborative benchmark to better inform maintenance and replacement planning

With GDAC™ (pictured above), utilities can forecast individual transformer health anywhere from 1 to 3 years in advance.

By using GDAC™, utilities share access to, not copies of, valuable transformer data and learn from the combined valuable experiences with faults and failures. This enables GDAC™ member utilities to reliably predict transformer failures and minimize unexpected replacement scenarios.

Want to expand your transformer knowledge base?

Reach out to me on LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to set up some time to chat and get a free analysis of your most at risk transformers.

Open Source Monday: Zero-Knowledge Proofs

/ /by

For the third installment of our “Open Source Monday” blog series, we provide a demonstration and example code of how Zero-Knowledge Proofs can be applied to clean energy applications.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) will be very familiar to blockchain experts and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. As we described last week, there are also non-financial applications for ZKPs in the clean energy sector. 

Imagine that you are an electric vehicle charging station company. You collect data from charging stations that have a huge amount of individual information. You collect and centralize that data for billing and maintenance. Some of the data could even be considered personally identifiable information. That is, time, location, vehicle type, etc. could be pieced together to identify an individual even without having a specific name of a person. 

In summary, your data is valuable. Others ask for it. The local utility wants access to help plan grid upgrades. The local government wants to use it to plan public transportation. Community groups want access to learn the impact on the environment. Do you hand over your data to them? A better approach would be to enable them to ask questions of your data in an anonymized way without you physically transferring the data. Fewer copies means less risk.

As an energy planner (e.g., utility, government, community group) how do I know the data is real if I never see it? This is where ZKPs come in. ZKPs can prove that the data is as expected without having to reveal the actual data itself. 

The video below shows an example of some of the steps to accomplish this. 

What you’ll see is:

  1. Two different “customer” datasets are provided to form a single dataset. Continuing the analogy above, this is like the EV charging station company storing two different customers’ data in the company’s database.
  2. That data is off-chain. A central Oracle creates a non-interactive proof.
  3. The Oracle also converts the proof into an image.
    The data is an array and each value in the array
    is represented by a proof in the form of a grayscale pixel.
  4. A new ZKP verification ERC721 compatible smart contract is created and an NFT of the image is minted.
  5. Using Truffle, a smart contract can be called to execute the validation of data without revealing the identity of the individual.

For our implementation, we take advantage of some recent advances in ZKPs. In particular, many ZKPs rely on some interaction with a prover and a verifier. They ask each other a series of questions to validate the data. Here, we apply an approach inspired by zk-SNARKs. The “N” in SNARK is for Non-Interactive. The genius behind this approach is that all the proof can be provided in a single message to the verifier, eliminating the traditional back and forth. There is a LOT of math behind this which is out of scope for our example. You can learn more about the math and how it works thanks to Zcash. For simplicity in this example (see GitHub), we use a simple hash implementation rather than a full zk-SNARK.

One other addition that we made here is that since the proof is a simple message, we can codify it as an image. We can then mint the image as an NFT. The big advantage of this approach is that proofs are visible to everyone and searchable by anyone on a platform like OpenSea or Coinbase without revealing any individual data. This removes a transaction headache for the data owner. They don’t need a new system or special hosting, etc. to handle inquiries about their data. 

And, the last addition, is that we have an example Polygon smart contract that enables an individual to validate their own dataset. What the validation code enables is that the EV charging company and / or energy planners who incentivize data owners to validate data get greater assurance that the data is real. This is a great use case of data privacy enabled through crypto.

The basic principles here can be applied to many sectors where there is centralized off-chain data, strict data privacy needs, and a need to prove the data is valid. Next week, you’ll see an expansion of this proof to leverage more of the zk-SNARK stack.

GreenTech National Funding Lab in Oklahoma Selects VIA for Clean Energy Program

/ /by

VIA is proud to join the inaugural cohort of the GreenTech National Funding Lab. Considered a highly competitive program, VIA was one of only ten companies chosen from across the country to form the inaugural cohort.

GreenTech National Funding Lab is the latest program to be launched by OK Catalyst, an office out of the University of Oklahoma, which assists in identifying opportunities to work with several participating Federal agencies including the Department of Defense (DOD), NASA, Department of Energy (DOE), and National Science Foundation (NSF).

Support from GreenTech National Funding Lab will accelerate VIA’s focus on delivering clean energy solutions to the Southeastern U.S. including, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Georgia. 

“Oklahoma in particular is a leader in clean energy generation technologies and forward thinking when it comes to data privacy issues,” said Joe Babiec, SVP Strategic Initiatives at VIA. He continued, “We’re thrilled that OK Catalyst has opened its doors for the first time to companies outside of Oklahoma to join one of their highly successful programs. We feel that VIA’s core technology will have immense value to support this community in their clean energy and data privacy goals.”

Though VIA’s participation in the GreenTech National Funding Lab is just getting underway, VIA has already identified a Web3 energy initiative within the state of Oklahoma. VIA envisions this application of the company’s blockchain technology as the first of many good things to come from its partnership with OK Catalyst and the GreenTech National Funding Lab.

Swiss Cognitive, World-Leading AI Network Selects VIA for Guest Article

/ /by

Swiss Cognitive, World-Leading AI Network selected VIA’s CEO, Colin Gounden, to share his point of view on the relationship between clean energy and blockchain technologies. The importance of clean energy in today’s economy and VIA’s long-standing expertise in this area were the primary reasons VIA was invited to write on this topic for Swiss Cognitive’s readers. In the article, Colin talks about how the decentralization of energy through rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles has created the ideal environment for blockchain to achieve solutions in clean energy:

“In a way, energy has evolved to become more adaptable to working with blockchain. Decentralization is at the core of Web3 and blockchain technologies – there are many players, in many locations, who interact but aren’t centrally controlled. As keen followers of energy and clean technologies will know, the last five years has seen an exponential increase in the decentralization of power.” – Colin Gounden, CEO of VIA

Colin’s guest article can be found on the Swiss Cognitive’s website.

Mastery Monday: Why You Should Care About Zero-Knowledge Proofs

/ /by

This is the second installment of our blog series, “Mastery Monday with VIA” where we share with you some of the inside details of our technology and math in 5 minutes or less. So, are you ready to become a master?

Math impacts everything we do. You never really see the math, but you experience it.

AI is the math that helps us control our TVs with our voice and drive our Teslas. We watch Netflix and listen to Spotify, courtesy of compression algorithms that send more and more data through increasingly crowded bandwidth.

One of the invisible math innovations that is changing the world is Zero-Knowledge Proofs or ZKPs. 

If you’re not familiar with ZKPs, these videos from UCLA Professor Amit Sahai and Up and Atom do an excellent job of explaining the concept easily. We particularly like how Prof. Sahai gets a 5 year old and a 13 year old to repeat back his definition of a ZKP, after he explains it. It’s a testament to great teaching.

So, why should you care about ZKPs?

The short answer is that if you care about privacy and fairness, then you care about ZKPs. It’s the math for you.

For example, ZKPs are used every day by millions of people in bitcoin and other cryptocurrency trading. It’s how two parties who don’t know each other can verify that the right amount of funds were transferred from one to another without the need of an intermediary like a bank. There are other, non-financial uses of ZKPs, as well. 

Given VIA’s mission to enable cleaner, safer, and more equitable communities, let’s use an example from the clean energy sector. VIA blog readers will know that our software platform enables energy data to be analyzed in such a way that an analyst will never see the source data (read more about that here).

This has obvious data privacy benefits to the data owner. Data owners don’t have to physically transfer their data to anyone or let an analyst see it in any way.

But, what about the analysts? How do they know that the data is legit? 

Well, one way is that an analyst could just trust the data owner. That works well if you both know the data owner and believe that they are reputable. For example, if you know the data owner is your public utility, and trust them, then as an analyst, you may say, “the data must be OK.”

What if the data owner isn’t someone you trust? They don’t necessarily have to be “untrustworthy.” You just don’t know them. So, the new energy retailer in your neighborhood, or the EV charging station start-up, or the microgrid operator may be perfectly legitimate. But, how do you know? How can you make sure they are playing fair?

This is where ZKPs come in. You don’t have to know. You don’t have to trust them. With ZKPs, you can mathematically verify that the data stored by the utility corresponds to the data offered to the analyst. Also, ZKPs, given a verifier, enable us to validate that the values of the data provided by the utility are indeed what the verifier is expecting. 

To take the example even further, think about consumer data. Energy is decentralizing rapidly to the individual level (e.g., rooftop solar and EVs). Your energy data is literally personally identifiable information so data privacy is paramount. At the same, you can’t possibly know and trust every other individual consumer as a data owner. ZKPs can address this.

So, is there a ZKP for energy data that energy analysts can use? Stay tuned for next week’s post …

 

Tech on Reg Interviews VIA CEO Colin Gounden for Podcast on Decentralizing the Energy Industry

/ /by

Dara Tarkowski, host of Tech on Reg, invited VIA’s CEO Colin Gounden as a guest on Episode 48 of the podcast. During the episode, “Decentralizing The Energy Industry” Colin talks about how Web3 is the next internet frontier, signaling a decentralized approach to the web, underpinned by blockchain technology. Colin explores where we are heading with Web3, what it means for data privacy, and how it’s taking shape in different industries.

One of our favorite quotes from Dara Tarkowski during the podcast was how VIA and clean energy relate:

“What VIA is doing is really combining up-and-coming technologies that have become so newsworthy that average consumers are starting to talk about this technology in a way that technologies have done for sometime with the desperate need for clean energy that has been so topical and the topic of every political race around the world. And VIA is right at the intersection.”

To listen to the full podcast, visit the Tech on Reg website. 

Open Source Monday: Homomorphic Encryption Meets NFT

/ /by

For the second installment of our “Open Source Monday” blog series, we are offering up a smart contract-based homomorphic encryption example. Check it out below!

Since you’re reading today’s blog, we’re betting you’ll have seen the fun math video we shared last week explaining how homomorphic encryption (HE) works. And, if you’re a long-time VIA follower, you will recall that we first released our own HE library back in 2020*.

Moving from math to code, here is an example of how to use the library using a smart contract. The great thing about this particular example is that you can use a standard ERC-1155 token. 

In summary, here’s what you’ll see:

  1. Two NFTs (bird images) that have one encrypted number each in their metadata.
    a. The NFTs are hosted on IPFS and searchable on OpenSea.
    b. The metadata also includes the public key and a sequence of coordinates on an elliptical curve.
    c. VIA uses NIST-compliant, 2048-bit RSA equivalent, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
  2. Polygon is used to create a standard ERC-1155 contract and mint all NFTs. The sum of the encrypted number NFT is represented as a third image (an egg).
  3. For this example, a Polygon scanner was used to enter the encrypted numbers and then sum them with VIA’s HE library. NOTE: In a live setting we would use an Oracle to execute the computation programmatically. 
  4. The encrypted sum gets placed in the metadata of a new NFT and minted. 
  5. The sum can be decrypted by the private key owner as verified by an Oracle.

OpenSea has the NFTs with encrypted data. For everyone’s reference, here are the unencrypted NFTs.

Of course, NFTs don’t have to be the source of the addition. This illustration, however, should resonate with Web3 game designers and NFT minters alike. For example, you could offer treasury chest NFTs based on breeding and only provide the reward, decrypted value, to the owner of the NFT.

You can also substitute another HE library, other than VIA’s, if you prefer. The VIA library has a number of advantages that we described in our original 2020 post.

Some of the key advantages of VIA’s HE library include:

  • NIST-compliant ECC
  • No limit on digits for addition
  • Fixed point calculations
  • Benchmarked as significantly faster than many other HE libraries

Reach out if you’d like to learn more about the VIA library.

Weigh in!

We’re considering hosting an Oracle to enable this functionality in general for anyone on a public blockchain. Would this be of interest to you? If so, Support this post (via LinkedIn) and RT (via Twitter).

*As one update to the 2020 HE post, VIA was issued patents on its homomorphic encryption approach in 2021 and additional patents in February 2022.

Mastery Monday: Homomorphic Encryption

/ /by

This is the first installment of our blog series, “Mastery Monday with VIA” where we share with you some of the inside details of our technology and math in 5 minutes or less. So, are you ready to become a master?

So, what is homomorphic encryption (HE)? 

HE is a way to compute something without knowing what the numbers are (i.e., keeping them encrypted). For example, adding two numbers or multiplying two numbers and learning the exact result while keeping each of the two input numbers secret.

Why does it matter? 

Unencrypted data is unsafe. With cybersecurity increasing, the last remaining case where data routinely remains unencrypted is during computations. Encryption is already commonly used when data is stored and when it’s sent from one place to another. 

When would you use it? 

Anytime you use math. Which is everywhere. A simple example is a census. I want to know how many people live in a town without knowing how many people live on any single street, in a particular building, or in their own home. AI is all math. So, voice and face recognition while the data is private is a more complicated example.

How does it work?

Check out this less than 4 minute video below! 

Please note: this video was filmed in VIA’s new office space, hence considerable echo. We recommend using the closed captions.

Want to learn more?

VIA holds several issued patents in homomorphic encryption. 

Other details related to VIA’s approach to HE are available from VIA’s earlier blog from 2020.

Next week, we’ll be sharing some code and a use for HE.

 

Below is a transcript of the “Homomorphic Encryption Explained” video.

Everybody, everywhere is asking about homomorphic encryption.

Said no one ever.

It’s not actually a thing that anyone ever asks about, but it’s super important, nonetheless.

And the reason is because keeping our data safe is super important.

So, the idea that we keep data safe when it’s at rest – that happens. Where the data is not safe is when you actually try to do some math on numbers.

For example, you have some data or information [Becky] and you have some data or information [Sam] and you want to do a comparison.

So, both of you have kitten collectible porcelain statues. And now we want to know which one of you has more without either of you revealing your own number because your porcelain kitten collection data is intensely personal.

[Becky] How did you know? 

[Sam] True.

As a person who’s doing, you know, high academic research, I’m really interested in the total sum of kitty collectors in this world and how many porcelain kitties there are in the world. That’s my thing! I’m super interested in it.

Don’t judge me.

Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to now add up the number of porcelain kitties in your collection [Becky] and the number of porcelain kitties in your collection [Sam]. And Becky, you’re not going to tell Sam how many. And Sam, you’re not going to tell Becky. And neither of you are going to tell me. And, even so, as a world-class researcher, I am going to be able to tell how many there are in the world without knowing either of those things.

And that’s one definition of homomorphic encryption, which is the ability to add up or multiply or divide or subtract or be able do some math without ever actually revealing any individual number.

So, the way that we are going to do that is we’re going to pretend this is my homomorphic encryption specialist device.

It’s actually my calculator on my phone here.

And as an example, what I’m going to do first is type in a number that is only visible to me, the researcher. And to you, the audience, only. So just let’s keep it between us. 

And now, I’m going to pass this to Becky. Add to whatever number I sent you. I want you to type it in and add the number of porcelain kitties that are in your collection.

Now you’re going to pass that to Sam.

Sam, I want you to add how many are in your collection.

Ok, now you’re going to pass it back to me.

And just to be clear, Becky, do you know how many porcelain kitties Sam has?

[Becky] No idea.

[Sam] Do you know how many porcelain kitties Becky has? (shakes head)

And, I don’t know how many they have either individually but I do know that together we have 24 is my guess. But is that true? That’s what I have in my calculator. Let’s see.

Becky, how many were in your collection actually? 

[Becky] 8.

And how many were in your collection?

[Sam] 16.

So 8 and 16, I’m pretty sure is 24. So we got the number! Even though neither of you knew each other’s numbers and I didn’t know what your numbers were.

And, there’s a lot of things you can do together to continue to obfuscate and hide the original numbers.

And we’ll talk later about some use cases.

We have an upcoming piece just on a use case of homomorphic encryption and NFTs in gaming. So, we’ll look forward to sharing some code and why that may be useful next time.

But, here was a little bit of a theory of homomorphic encryption particularly applied to addition.

Thanks for watching!

VIA’s Joe Babiec and Advisor General Tom Blackstock Participate in 3-Day JETC Conference

/ /by

VIA was proud to participate in this year’s JETC Conference. This is the first time the conference has been in person in three years, with over 2,000 attendees participating.

To kick off the event, VIA’s SVP, Strategic Initiatives, Joe Babiec and Advisor, General Tom Blackstock, set up shop in the exhibit hall that included over 150 participating companies. The duo had excellent conversations with fellow attendees about the ways JARVIS™ supports facilities management.

A peek into VIA’s booth at JETC.

On Day 2, General Tom Blackstock moderated the panel, “SMEs in Installation Facility Management and AI” with Joe Babiec, Major General William T. Nesbitt, and Lowell Ursey, Integration Branch Chief, NDR PMO. The panel covered how to prioritize facility investments in an environment where demands on today’s military facilities are increasing and budgets to support improvements to critical infrastructure are tight.

General Tom Blackstock moderating the panel discussion (photo courtesy of JETC Conference committee).

For a full recap on the event including a fun 2-minute video, visit the JETC website.

Colin Gounden Joins Wharton’s Sarah Hammer for Conversation about AI, Blockchain, and Clean Energy

/ /by

VIA’s CEO Colin Gounden joined The Wharton School’s Sarah Hammer for a conversation about how the use of blockchain, crypto, and AI connects to clean energy. Speaking specifically about technology in the crypto space, Colin commented:

“In general, we see the technology and tech stack evolving so fast in the crypto space that it’s where innovation is happening. Anytime that you want to provide a technology solution, you want to go to where the innovation is happening fastest.”

For more great questions and insights from Colin and Sarah’s chat, check out the full recording here.