SIAT professors Steve DiPaola and Kate Hennessy, together with Taylor Owen from UBC's journalism school, received a Google/Knight Foundation grant to carry out the research. They presented the work to international journalists at a Journalism 360 demo event honoring grantees in New York on July 24, and the next day at a full conference held across the street from the New York Times headquarters. "Our goal is to create a working technique that would be much better at conveying emotional and knowledge information than current anonymization techniques," says DiPaola, a pioneer in AI/VR facial recognition processes. Based on its research, the team has created an updated pixelating technique using an AI "painting" approach to anonymization. "When artists paint a portrait, they try to convey the subject's outer and inner resemblance," says DiPaola, who heads SFU's Interactive Visualization Lab.