AnyVision Pivots With Carnegie Mellon Partnership, Rebrands as Oosto

“With the launch of Oosto, we’re looking beyond the lens of security to include ways our solutions can positively impact an organization’s safety, productivity and customer experience.” – Avi Golan, CEO, Oosto

Facial recognition specialist AnyVision is looking to pivot its business focus through a new partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Biometric Research Center, and the company is rebranding to reflect the change. Its new name is Oosto.

Based in Israel, the company has become a prominent vendor of facial recognition technology focused on surveillance and access control. But Oosto’s leadership now want to expand beyond those use cases with fresh R&D efforts in computer vision areas like object and behavioral recognition. In practical terms, this would enable Oosto’s technology to identify objects and events ranging from weapon detection to flagging when an individual has tripped and fallen.

“Historically, the company has focused on security-related use cases for our watchlist alerting and touchless access control solutions,” explained Oosto CEO Avi Golan. “With the launch of Oosto, we’re looking beyond the lens of security to include ways our solutions can positively impact an organization’s safety, productivity and customer experience.”

As AnyVision, the company had been the subject of some media scrutiny over concerns about the use of its technology in an alleged mass surveillance program, though an independent audit ultimately cleared the company of wrongdoing, finding no evidence of such a program. In recent years the company became known for its outspoken position on the need for ethical guidelines in the use of facial recognition technology.

That particular technology will only be one component of a broader computer vision platform in the future, of course. Elaborating on the company’s aims, Golan explained that Oosto’s “elite U.S.-based AI research” partners will help the company’s team to develop solutions that can be applied in areas “including medical, payments, and smart cities.”

The partnership will see the CMU Biometrics Center’s founder and director, Professor Marios Savvides, join Oosto as the company’s Chief AI Scientist. Prof. Savvides will work with CTO Dieter Joecker as they lead Oosto’s AI team toward new horizons going forward.

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October 27, 2021 – by Alex Perala