Meet the project: PRINIA

Can you briefly explain what your project is all about? What’s unique about it?

The PRINIA project addresses the need to protect individual privacy and personal data in XR facial recognition. To achieve this, PRINIA develops an autonomous module that implements facial recognition in XR while ensuring the protection of individual privacy and compliance with relevant EU legislation and regulations by adopting a validated research framework and a three-step innovation process: i) privacy rules and compliance management, ii) facial recognition supporting privacy enhancement, and iii) integration for privacy-preserving XR facial recognition. The derived autonomous module supports various scenarios within XR environments, including individual identification, group categorization, and headset user identification, ensuring that users can be identified and categorized without compromising privacy or other sensitive data when using immersive technologies.

What’s the biggest milestone with your project your startup(s) have achieved so far, and what has surprised you most on this journey?

The biggest milestone achieved by the PRINIA project so far is completing the conceptual design of the PRINIA module, including the management of privacy rules/compliance and the implementation of XR facial recognition with privacy enhancement techniques. This milestone signifies a step forward in designing a system that meets the PRINIA and SERMAS projects' goals by demonstrating a path toward achieving a privacy-preserving facial recognition module for XR environments. What surprised us most on this journey is that while the EU has described several steps for privacy preservation in detail and that there is a growing interest in privacy-preserving techniques, challenges like scalability and accuracy often arise. In PRINIA, we now focus on specifying such challenges and refining differential privacy techniques to overcome these limitations.

How did you measure success?

To measure the success of PRINIA, we use SMART objectives and KPIs. They are divided into three main categories: promotion and dissemination, technical excellence, and user experience. Regarding promotion and dissemination, we have presented PRINIA in the "Shaping The Future" workshop, aiming to co-develop principles for policy recommendations for responsible innovation in virtual worlds during the esteemed CHI conference. We also publish and share newsletters periodically. Regarding technical excellence, we have tested the identification accuracy for HMD user identification while applying privacy enchantments, achieving a score of over 90%. Regarding user acceptance, we plan to perform evaluation studies in the following months, aiming to measure user acceptance, workload, and convenience during the PRINIA scenarios.

What are your goals over the next three and six, months?

Over the following months, the goal is to complete the MVPs and integrate them with the SERMAS ecosystem. In particular, during the next three months, we will focus on identifying and verifying individuals in an XR environment. For example, imagine trainees who undergo a facial recognition process for authentication during virtual journalism training, and once authenticated, they are granted access to the training environment. Next, in the following three months, we will focus on categorizing individuals into groups based on common characteristics, such as emotional states. For example, PRINIA will be able to categorize customers based on their facial attributes (e.g., satisfied customers, anxious customers, neutral customers), and personalized customer experience is provided in the customer reception kiosk.

How has SERMAS helped you during the past few months?

SERMAS has helped us in multiple ways during the past few months. We collaborate well with our mentors (King's College London), who support and guide us in making appropriate decisions and adjustments to implement the PRINIA project better and achieve the SERMAS objectives. We have regular meetings to share insights and keep track of the projects. Moreover, we receive feedback and insights from sprint review meetings with the rest of the stakeholders and partners of the SERMAS consortium. Finally, SERMAS supports us technically and financially to implement the solutions described in the PRINIA project.

Companies: Human Opsis and Algolysis.