JUAN RAMÓN TRONCOSO-PASTORIZA

Successful data confidentiality ensures that unauthorized users cannot access the data they must not see or use. The process is critical for all organizations. Yet, the task is often challenging. Companies are increasingly becoming data-dependent to make decisions. Most of them realize that their own data is insufficient to make the best decisions. Most organizations feel the need to establish partnerships with other enterprises while protecting their own data. 

Such a trend is accelerated by the current evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Additionally, regulatory frameworks are evolving rapidly to protect people’s rights and ensure data sovereignty. The EU General Data Protection Regulation has become the Gold standard. 

The industry requires innovative and refined data confidentiality solutions. Lausanne, Switzerland-based Tune Insight is focused on extending similar solutions. “Tune Insight’s solutions address these combined challenges, letting our customers retain full control of their data and still work together to securely extract collective actionable insights with streamlined regulatory compliance. Based on 10+ years of world-class research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Tune Insight is revolutionizing confidential and sensitive data usage by enabling the extraction of valuable insights from multiple sources without moving or revealing raw data. Consequently, organizations are able to participate in unheard-of collaborations, such as health emergencies like COVID. Tune Insight imparts the ability to streamline or plainly enable extraction of highly accurate, valuable, and comprehensive collective insights from sensitive, confidential and regulated data,” informs Juan Ramon Troncoso-Pastoriza, Co-founder & CEO. 

Solutions from Tune Insight are leveraged by enterprises belonging to critical industries, including finance, cyber security, and healthcare, among others.

For instance, fraud detection and anti-money laundering in the financial services industry is a huge challenge. Organizations have to deal with constant challenges, such as restricted visibility into transactions. Fraudsters are taking advantage of the limitations. “With Tune Insight, institutions can extract collective insights that expand way beyond their usual visibility, whereas the raw data of each institution is never moved or disclosed,” continues Troncoso-Pastoriza.

Enterprises belonging to cybersecurity usually share only the least valuable data when they work together. The data is too shallow to create a profound impact on the prevention and detection systems. Tune Insight focuses on extracting collective insights from the most confidential datasets. Relying on this process, Tune Insight enables enterprises to better protect themselves against cyber attacks. 

In healthcare, medical facilities often need to collaborate on patient data to provide improved care to their patients. However, it is essential to ensure the data remains undisclosed to each other throughout the process. The challenge is often significant in cross-border collaborations from regions where patient data cannot be exported. With Tune Insight, care providers, payers, and pharmaceutical companies can collaborate securely and extract collective results, e.g. survival analysis for precision oncology, without moving their raw patient data and protecting the whole data pipeline end-to-end.

A Successful Privacy-preserving Stint at Swiss Hospitals

The story is about privacy-preserving personalized reference ranges at Swiss hospitals. The quality of the reference ranges strongly depends on sufficient representation of population variety. The solution from Tune Insight has helped in the inclusion of different sites possible through simple methods.

Reference ranges can easily be obsolete as they are derived from small patient groups, usually outdated, and from geographies that might not be relevant locally. The process of computation of reference ranges requires massive amounts of data. A wide range of ethical and legal complications arise while dealing with sensitive personal information of patients.

The requirement was for an innovative solution. Tune Insight came across as the most viable option. The benefits associated with the Tune Insight solution are many. With Tune Insight, raw data doesn’t move. The need for a trusted third party doesn’t arise. It supports a wide range of operations. Tamper-evident auditing and traceability are other critical features of the solution. Tune Insight clients are able to leverage unique benefits, including streamlined ethical approvals and proven data protection benefits.

The Way Ahead

 “Most of our current customers are focusing on collective analytics use-cases, paving the way for collective federated learning in the near future. We are planning our first US deployments in healthcare and expanding our footprint in cybersecurity, financial services, and defense in Switzerland, the EU, and the US. In the mid-term, we aim at becoming the de-facto platform for collective analytics and secure federated learning,” explains Troncoso-Pastoriza.