The program, backed by Unisys and IDEMIA, can handle 100,000 daily transactions, and also will be used for citizenship applications. The system facilitates the processing of legitimate travelers and is designed to support anticipated growth in visa applications, border clearances and applications for citizenship over the next 10 years.

Biometric authentication in recent years has moved well beyond fingerprints, with projects involving faces, irises and even biometric cardiac signatures picking up steam. That’s right, a person’s heart might provide authorities with a precise way to figure out who people are, and do it from a distance. The U.S. Defense Department reportedly is exploring that […]

2020 Women in Biometrics award winner Anne May is the OBIM Biometric Support Center Lead for the Office of Biometric Identity Management with the Department of Homeland Security. She wound up in this career by chance. In 1998, she took on a new position at the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a systems portfolio manager. […]

Like many leaders in the biometric industry, Lauren Reed, Senior Program Director for Biometric Forensics, IDEMIA National Security Solutions, knew nothing of biometrics when her career began in the mid-1990s. “I was doing traditional forensics work at a local sheriff’s office,” Reed says. “I received a phone call from an old mentor who said the […]

Newly out of college, Jeni Best was working for a Texas probation department when a co-worker needed some moral support. “My office mate made me go take the immigration test with him because he didn’t want to go by himself,” Best says, “and I, within six months, was offered a position with the INS (US […]

Annet Steenbergen is the co-founder/initiator of the Aruba Happy Flow biometric border control project for the Government of Aruba. The journey to Happy Flow began 25 years ago when she stumbled into a job with the Dutch Immigration Naturalization Service. “Before long, I worked mostly in border management and border management policy,” Steenbergen says. “I […]

Face morphing, where an attacker merges photos of two people into a single image, is a specialty of Mei Ngan, Computer Scientist, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and leader in morph detection. “If that image gets onto an identity credential such as a passport, it can be used by both people because modern […]