‍05 / 06 / 2019

 

Truata Nominated for two National Fellowship and Industry Awards

THE NATIONAL FELLOWSHIP AND INDUSTRY AWARDS NOMINEE

Truata are delighted to have been shortlisted in two categories for The National Fellowship and Industry Awards. We have been shortlisted in both the Implementation of AI Award and Emerging Tech Product categories.

The National Fellowship and Industry Awards were created to recognise outstanding talent and promote excellence across the Analytics Industry. It is a real honour to be shortlisted for these awards as they are the ultimate in peer recognition with the winners being selected by the Analytics Institute members in a nationwide vote. Take a look at our double nominated solution below.
The Challenge

Companies, across all industries, are under increasing pressure to become more data-driven. They’re analysing customer data to understand and improve their processes, products and services to make decisions and drive their businesses forward. These data-driven decisions are critical to maintaining a competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, as a result of the GDPR, many companies have been forced to curtail or cease valuable analytics programs. Others have engaged in in-house anonymisation. However, since these companies hold the original source data they are likely only producing pseudonymised data. Thus, falling short of the threshold set under the GDPR.

Innovative Business Solution
The Trūata solution provides a new standard in data hosting and anonymisation. Using proprietary processes, methodologies and intellectual property, the solution makes it possible for organisations to analyse their data while complying with privacy and data protection regulations.
The solution is a set of processing steps designed to identify and mitigate privacy risks through a combination of manual and automatic actions.

The Trūata Anonymisation Solution is depicted in Figure 1 below.

Trūata data anonymization pipeline
Figure 1: Trūata’s data anonymisation solution

 

Truata’s Anonymisation Solution brings customer data on the following journey, with each step below corresponding to the numbered step in Figure 1:

1. Customer removes personal data and tokenises direct and indirect identifiers then transfers to Truata
2. Truata tokenises direct and indirect identifiers
3. Truata runs risk assessment routines to identify privacy risks and applies anonymisation techniques to data
4. Truata moves data to customer specific data storage and performs analytics to generate reports and model code
5. Aggregated reports and model code provided to customer. Customer can use those insights to improve their business processes and better serve their customers
6. Truata analyses the anonymized data using tools selected based on each individual customer’s analytical needs
7. Customers receive analytics, algorithms and aggregated reports back from Truata for use in their products and solutions
8. Customers apply those analytics, algorithms and reports to unlock powerful, value-generating insights from their data

The Analytics-Based Approach

Along this data journey, data science and advanced machine learning techniques are employed.

1. Anonymisation recommendations. The Trūata team begin by learning about the customers data, how they use it and what sensitive identifiers it contains. Following this, automatic tests are run to identify further risks. Anonymisation actions are defined manually but as the team engages further with the customer machine learning algorithms are used to automatically recommend appropriate anonymisation actions to apply to certain fields. These range from “basic” machine learning where the structure and types of data are well-known, to more sophisticated deep learning techniques where unstructured data is being processed.
2. Personal data identification. As part of the risk assessment process the entire dataset is scanned to find personal data. For certain types such as email or IP addresses, well known patterns are used while for types such as postal addresses or the names of locations or people, AI is used. This is especially true for unstructured data such as comments or user provided data. Natural language processing techniques are used to find personal data so that it can be anonymised.
3. Dynamic Outlier handling. Outliers are data fields or records whose value differs from the majority of others to a significant degree. Outliers are more distinctive and thus have a higher reidentification risk. Basic approaches to outlier handling involve calculated fixed thresholds and removing or adding extra processing to fields whose values lie outside the threshold. The Trūata solution takes a more dynamic approach, recognising that for any given query what is considered an outlier might change. Trūata uses AI to dynamically decide what represents an outlier when a query is made so that appropriate thresholds are used and privacy is preserved while optimising analytic output to the highest degree possible.
4. Privacy-conscious analytics tools. To empower customers to make data driven decisions as normal, Trūata provides tools that customers are familiar with, such as data science notebooks. Using these, customers can train and build machine learning models over their data. Supporting these AI applications while also preserving privacy requires specialised tools using machine learning to analyse a dataset and make intelligent recommendations around features that can be utilised, for example, in building models.

The Outcome

Truata’s solution powers client’s predictive analysis so their acquisition and retention programs can be optimised.  It facilitates longitudinal studies, as data retention limitations don’t apply to non-personal data, allowing developmental trends to surface. It ensures companies can analyse larger portions of their data universe, resulting in less biased, more powerful analytics. All of these increase the accuracy of insights leading to more efficient marketing spend and the strengthening of brand preference translating to higher margins and market share.

The Truata team are really looking forward to the National Fellowship and Industry Awards ceremony which will take place in the Westin Hotel, hosted by Master of Ceremonies, Síle Seoige. For more information on the awards and nominees visit here.

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