Justin Picard is currently Chief Technology Officer for Scantrust, a  product authentication and traceability company that  he founded in late 2013 together with Nathan J. Anderson and Paul Landry. Picard invented and patented the core technology for his current company, which is based on a QR Code that has built-in security against counterfeiting.

Together with Karl Lallerstedt and Oksana Myshlovska, Picard co-founded Black Market Watch in 2013, a Swiss NGO based in the Canton of Geneva.  Picard was on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on illicit Trade from 2009 to 2014, and has been on the OECD Taskforce on Countering Illicit Trade since 2013.  He was the taskforce co-methodology leader and developed a framework to measure the impacts and harms of illicit trade. He has been an expert at the Global Initiative since 2014.

Prior to his role at Scantrust, Picard was Chief Scientist for Advanced Track and Trace in Paris from 2006 to 2013. In his role,  he developed the authentication and tracking technology which has been applied to billions of products. Picard and his company were selected as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2009.

From 2004 to 2006, Picard worked as head of research and development at Thomson technicolor in Essen, Germany. Part of his work involved developing a video watermarking technology for forensic tracking against in-theater piracy.

From 2001 to 2004, Picard was R&D engineer at Mediasec Technologies in Providence, Rhode Island. His work focused on the implementation of digital watermarking for forensic tracking of images and videos. In 2002, while searching for an optimal solution to the problem of detecting digital watermarks in printed materials to detect counterfeits, Instead of using digital watermarks, Picard realized that the problem could be much more efficiently solved with visible, copy-sensitive image structures, which he called “copy detection pattern”.  Copy-detection patterns and variations on this technology are commercialized by several companies.

Picard grew up in Montreal, Canada, where he obtained his Bachelor Engineering in in physics at Polytechnique Montreal in 1994. He obtained his Master of Science in Engineering on the detection of forged signatures using pattern recognition techniques, also at Polytechnique Montreal in 1997. Picard obtained his PhD from University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 2000; his thesis focused on the application of artificial intelligence techniques to information  retrieval. He then went in 2000-2001 to EPFL for a Postdoc in digital watermarking, where his research focused on the prevention of attacks to digital watermarking systems.  Picard is also an IMD business school graduate.

Picard  has published a number of  scientific articles  and patents on counterfeit detection techniques, digital watermarking, information retrieval, and on the topic of illicit trade.