Rutgers executes exclusive license with AI startup developed at school

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The Rutgers University Office for Research announced March 30 it is executing an exclusive license with Steg.AI, a startup based on artificial intelligence that was developed at Rutgers and founded by double graduate Eric Wengrowski and School of Engineering professor Kristin Dana.

Steg.AI hopes to use its innovative security software to help businesses and organizations protect their media assets and intellectual property. Its mission is to establish a level provenance for all digital media, using patented steganography technology to place attribution into content so that users can be sure that what they are engaging with is real and trustworthy.

The technology is the brainchild of Wengrowski, who received his bachelor’s degree and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers. He worked with Dana as a senior on his capstone project and she invited him to join her lab as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

“The technology we developed is information security software that businesses can utilize to protect their media assets and intellectual property (IP),” said Wengrowski in a press release. “We leverage a research technology developed along with some of my co-founders called light field messaging, which is an advanced forensic water marketing technique that adds information to files like images, video, pdfs, gifs, etc. that is invisible to us but visible to our algorithms or even a camera. This information is essentially embedded into these files as forensic tracers for our customers, so they can figure out who is doing what their assets.”

The research was conducted by Wengrowski, Dana and a team that focused on the ability to transmit information with light in a way that is only visible to a machine or a camera. They were then able to tailor that work after meeting with some companies.

“We participated in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national I-Corps program and received feedback regarding the real-use cases of the technology, and we realized that we had a very compelling value proposition for information security,” said Wengrowski. “We learned that by talking to companies like Meta, Getty, and Adobe, and then putting two and two together about how we could solve those problems.”

“We were able to leverage recent deep learning advancers to build a robust solution to the pattern embedding problem,” said Dana. “By taking part in the Bay Area I-Corps in the Winter Cohort 2019, we were able to dedicate significant time and effort to in-person customer discovery to explore commercial needs for our technology.”

The development of Steg.AI comes at a critical time with the rapid rise of AI technology—which also increases the use of deepfakes or other misleading content using artificial intelligence.

Steg.AI was able to parlay its technology into funding from a variety of sources. It recently closed a seed fundraising deal with leading cybersecurity venture investors.

The Rutgers Office for Research’s Innovation Ventures filed patent applications for the technology in the United States, European Union, China, Japan, and India, and helped handle the execution of the exclusive license to Steg.AI.

“Steg.AI is another example of Rutgers excellence and how the university is leading the way into the future,” said Deborah Perez Fernandez, acting executive director for Innovation Ventures. “The rise of deepfakes, mis- and disinformation highlights the importance of the potential impact that the technology developed by Dr. Wengrowski and Dr. Dana can have around the world.”