Herta earns top honors at MWC23 Hackathon

At the MWC23 Hackathon, Herta won first prize for applying privacy and ethical principles to facial recognition technology.

The Mobile World Congress 23 held its latest edition of the Hackathon on Security in Facial Recognition Systems at the beginning of March.

This challenge aimed to find Spanish companies capable of adapting their applications to evolving European regulation of facial recognition.

Participating teams had to build prototypes, processes and source codes to improve compliance with new European regulations and produce a presentation and functional executable code for the organization at the end of the session.

The Hackathon was organized by Digital Future Society, a program promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation of the Spanish government in collaboration with Mobile World Capital. It connects academics, governments, companies and members of civil society to understand and address the ethical, social and economic challenges of digital transformation.

The Hackathon was open to Spanish companies with facial biometric recognition applications and experts in software development in data protection, privacy, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. It had a total prize pool of 3,000 euros (roughly US$3,160) distributed among three winners: Herta, which won the first prize of €2,000; Tech Solutions, which won the second prize of €1,000; and Deimos, which was awarded the third prize.

Herta’s team expressed their gratitude to all those involved in the event for providing them with this opportunity to showcase their work.

“We would like to thank the Spanish Government and the Secretary of State for Artificial Intelligence for giving us this award,” says Javier Rodríguez, the CEO of Herta.

The company also expressed its commitment to continue working on the most secure and ethical applications of facial recognition technology in compliance with regulations.

“It honors the efforts that Herta has made in this field to achieve a technology with the necessary transparency to the citizen, to provide excellent accuracy and quality to end users and to comply with current regulations within the European Union at the same time,” adds Rodríguez.

In 2019, the European Commission commended Herta Security for its crowd-monitoring system that combines face biometrics and real-time behavior analysis with the “COVID-19 Response Seal of Excellence.”

Article Topics

AI  |  biometrics  |  ethics  |  facial recognition  |  Herta Security  |  MWC  |  regulation  |  surveillance