December 1, 2023

Building the Posemesh: Exploring Dr. Steinberger's Pioneering Work in Positioning Consensus Technology

Welcome to the fascinating world of Dr. John Steinberger, the mastermind behind the cutting-edge algorithms that propel Auki Labs to the forefront of technological innovation.

An internationally recognized expert in cryptography and mathematics, Dr. Steinberger's illustrious academic journey at Tsinghua University has poised him at the pinnacle of his field.

His current endeavor? Pioneering the revolutionary positioning consensus technology that promises to be the bedrock of tomorrow's navigation and tracking systems.

However, Dr. Steinberger's contributions extend beyond theoretical work. He authored and programmed automated digital tools for learning calculus.

Join us as we delve into the mind and the milestones of Auki Labs' Chief Scientist—a visionary reshaping the very fabric of our digital landscape.

Could you share highlights of your career that led you to become the Chief Scientist at Auki Labs?

Getting a Ph.D. at UC Davis was a good start. I got a professorship later but felt claustrophobic and decided to make a dash for it in the private sector.

How has your work in cryptography and computational mathematics influenced the development of the posemesh?

In crypto you get a good sense of the importance of the basic security primitives, obviously, such as hashing and digital signatures. Most useful things are built from just those two, plus encryption.

What inspired you to be part of the Auki Labs project, and what vision do you have for its future?

Nils recruited with his boundless charm. :) We had lived in the same compound in Beijing at some point. He originally wanted me to help with tokenomics, but my role grew to encompass more vanilla software engineering, with other team members taking over the token part.

Related Post: Recap - Auki Labs CEO Nils Pihl's Live AMA Session in the Aukiverse Discord Community

How does your work align with the core mission of Auki Labs?

I am responsible for the posemesh SDK, meaning many API designs. I have also been responsible for drafting the pose estimation, loop closure, and landmark calibration algorithms.

Can you explain, in layman's terms, how the posemesh works and what makes it an advancement in the field of positioning consensus?

The posemesh is an open-source protocol for determining your position from scanned nearby landmarks. It is unique in that it allows decentralized, self-hosted geometry. You can position yourself inside your local supermarket or mall (anywhere, really) based on scanned geometry that can be locally hosted at that supermarket or mall.

Related Post: What is the Posemesh?

What are the most significant technical challenges you've faced while working at Auki Labs and developing the posemesh, and how have you overcome them?

I ended up doing a lot of SDK design and development. Basically, software engineering. It sounds banal, but you have to be constantly cleaning up after yourself if you don’t want the complexity of the system to take the upper hand on you. This was a challenge. Our proprietary loop closure algorithm was also a challenge. We solved it by successive simplification. Our original draft was much more complicated than what ultimately proved to work well.

How does the posemesh leverage blockchain and cryptography to ensure security and reliability?

The token is used as a currency for people running Hagall, the decentralized networking engine. Standard cryptographic authentication methods are used to protect the privacy of domain data. There is no point in reinventing the wheel in the world of cryptography, and - in fact - much to lose by doing so.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: away for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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