Ex-Intel engineer sets up startup for AI data protection

By Jun Ji-hye

Kim Tae-hoon, a former engineer at Intel, has set up a startup called Deeping Source, aimed at collecting, generating and providing safe-to-use data in the intelligent world.

The startup, founded in June last year, has since developed data anonymization technology enabling secure and transparent data collection and sharing.

“The technology removes personally identifiable information from data, while preserving use for machine learning and analytics,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times.

He became interested in issues involving personal data, data ownership and copyright while working at Intel.

“While a huge amount of data is necessary for artificial intelligence, privacy laws have rapidly become a touchy issue, with people expressing concerns over what would happen with their personal data,” he said. “I thought there would be a greater need for protecting private information in data and protecting the data itself in the distribution process.”

He started working at Intel as a principal engineer in April 2012 after it aquired Olaworks, a computer vision technology company that he co-founded in 2006.

At Intel, he was tasked with designing machine learning architecture to accelerate machine learning algorithms on next-generation hardware.

“Intel was a great company with a lot of opportunities,” Kim said. “But I wanted to establish a company once again as I was interested more in data creation, collection, processing and sharing.”

Currently, Deeping Source has 13 employees, with the startup planning to increase the number of employees to 20 soon.

Kim said the startup is seeking to accomplish diverse successful cases with the firm's data protection technology in various areas including AI cameras, autonomous driving and medical treatment data.

“I want to contribute to innovating the AI industry by helping enterprises utilize data containing personal information without infringing on privacy,” he said. “Individuals will also be able to offer their data without worry.”

Deeping Source was one of the beneficiaries of Facebook's Namsan Lab Korea, a program run by the social media giant to help startups in their early stages advance their businesses more effectively and make inroads into global markets.

“I have received a lot of help from the Namsan Lab Korea program in terms of learning various cases of successes and failures, and networking,” he said.