Identity Resolution in the Sharing Econo...

A growing sharing economy demands new, cost effective ways of establishing and checking identity, to allow services and participants to accurately assess risks and make good choices. For example, Airbnb verifies offline identities using a scan of your driver’s license or passport. This is checked against templates designed to examine things like the layout and other government indicators of authenticity to help confirm that it appears to be valid. Crucially it involves checking an applicant’s entered name – often in Latin script – against their name on the scanned document, which may be in another script or language, and subject to potentially egregious OCR errors. More generally, connecting the public and private traces that people, organizations and things — like vehicles — leave in various information stores is essential to delivering valuable analytics and novel services. This is often called entity analytics or identity resolution. In this talk, we will explore enabling technology in both structured and unstructured contexts, discuss current challenges and limitations, and explore additional examples.