University, industry and government experts from across America converged on Morgantown this week to explore ways to use human physical or behavioral traits for identification and credibility assessment – a science known as biometrics with national security and safety implications for a complicated world.

The discussions were a part of the fall meeting of the Center for Identification Technology Research held at West Virginia University. CITeR is the only National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center focusing on the rapidly growing areas of biometric identification and credibility assessment technology.

WVU is the Center’s founding and lead site focusing on biometrics and related identification technology systems. The University of Arizona is the Center’s second site focusing on credibility assessment systems. Each CITeR University site maintains interdisciplinary collaborative partnerships with other academic institutions to effectively respond to affiliate research needs.

WVU President James Clements delivered welcoming remarks to the CITeR representatives who included experts from a range of industry representatives known as affiliates. In addition to WVU, the University of Arizona, Michigan State University, Rutgers University and Clarkson University were represented.

Clements said that CITeR is “not only peeling back the mysteries of biometrics for important applications on a national-impact scale, it is also developing a future workforce to take those innovations to entirely new productive levels. We know it’s working because we know that our biometrics graduates are highly regarded in industry and government through the kind of feedback that these partnerships are providing.

“We are also working together to help make America a safer place to live and we know that’s working because of the work of researchers like Nathan Kalka – a doctoral student here – and Brian DeCann – two talented individuals who successfully demonstrated new techniques and algorithms for face and gait recognition at night in the Arizona desert with enviable success.”

WVU’s Bojan Cukic is a co-director of CITeR and explained that the work of the center also focuses on training interdisciplinary scientists, engineers and students as well as transferring technologies.

“The Center was created in 2001 and since then, we have run about 80 to 90 projects,” Cukic told Findbiometrics.com in an interview. “We are also actively working on cross-age facial recognition projects and our more recent research has been heading in the direction of utilizing DNA as biometrics?We always have interesting projects in known modalities; iris and ocular biometrics, face and fingerprints, etc. Recent projects deal with an understanding of altered fingerprints and how we can catch up with that threat to security. On the other side, we have some very vigorous projects that are trying to establish the credibility of speakers in any video or audio file. These are, as I would describe it, non-intrusive lie detection tests.”

Iris recognition, tattoo image matching and retrieval, fingerprint detection and biometric fusion technologies are just some of the projects on the CITeR research plate.

Affiliates, fund, drive, and shape the shared research portfolio of the Center. Affiliates work cooperatively and are a mix of public and private organizations including:

• Accenture
• Biometric Identity Management Agency
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Center for Applied Social Research at the University of Oklahoma
• Computer Science Corporation
• Department of Defense – Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment
• Department of Defense – Defense Research and Engineering
• Department of Defense – USSOCOM/SOALT
• Department of Homeland Security – Science & Technology
• Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – Information Systems Security
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Forensitec/Nemesysco
• Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Finland
• Lockheed Martin
• MorphoTrak
• National Security Agency
• Northrop Grumman
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence
• Raytheon
• Sandia National Labs
• Science Applications International Corporation
• SRC
• U.S. Army, Picatinny Arsenal – ARDEC

-WVU-

gg/10/22/10

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