IEEE to Hold Biometrics Workshop at UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Subtle differences in the ways that individuals look, walk, write and speak -- known as biometrics -- will be the subject of the Fourth IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Workshop on Automatic Identification Advanced Technologies to be held Oct. 17-18 at the University at Buffalo.

The international conference, "AutoID 2005," is the only one that the IEEE holds on biometrics, the science of identifying individuals based on their physical, chemical or behavioral characteristics, and the basis of critical technologies for strengthening homeland security.

Hosted by UB's Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) and sponsored by the Calspan-UB Research Center (CUBRC) and UltraScan Corp., it will be held in the Center for Tomorrow on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

On Oct. 18, at 8:15 a.m., Rama Chellappa, Ph.D., Minta Martin Professor of Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, will deliver the keynote address on "Biometrics for Remote Surveillance: Recent Advances in Face and Gait-Based Person Identification." The talk will focus on methods of identifying individuals from a surveillance camera, a critical application for public spaces or crowded environments such as airports.

Russell W. Bissette, M.D., executive director of the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR), will deliver the banquet address on "Biometrics and Homeland Security" at 6 p.m. on Oct. 17 at the Top of the Falls Restaurant in Niagara Falls.

Sessions and posters will cover new research in different biometrics ranging from the way people write, talk, look or even the way they walk to new ways of preserving the privacy of biometric data. Research on RFID, Radio Frequency Identification, where electronic tags can replace conventional barcodes, and fusion of biometric modalities, in which two or more biometrics are combined, also will be presented.

Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., UB professor of computer science, director of CUBS and the conference chair, will report on computational methods of extracting specific features from facial images in order to better identify them.

UB researchers also will present research on computationally detecting patterns in voices of individuals to determine their native languages and geographic origin.

The workshop has attracted international speakers and attendees from corporations including IBM, Mitre Corp., Siemens USA and Samsung, and universities including Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, the University of Notre Dame, Jinlan University of China, the University of Sweden and others in the U.K., Brazil and Malaysia.

For further information, go to http://www.cubs.buffalo.edu/autoid or call 716-645-6164 ext. 114.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.