The University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB) proposes to join the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) as a university site. CITeR, currently comprised of Clarkson University (lead), West Virginia University and the University of Arizona, was established about a decade ago to be the forum for bringing industry and academic interests to converge in the biometrics arena..
The UB site proposes to advance the science of biometric technologies for both civilian and homeland security applications by integrating pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms with sensors technology. The UB team plans to fuse brain scans with facial expressions and recognition to attempt to record emotion. UB's interest is in encrypting biometric templates while maintaining efficiency of indexing and search. The multidisciplinary faculty at the UB site will design chemical and photo sensors to propose new biometric modalities with integrated liveness detection.
The UB site will further CITeR's objective to serve as a comprehensive academic center serving the growing identification technology research, undergraduate and graduate education, and outreach needs of the public and private sectors. The UB site brings an experienced team in the areas of behavioral science, computer vision, visualization, pattern recognition, machine learning, and pervasive computing. Under the auspices of BEAM (Buffalo Area Engineering Awareness for Minorities), the proposed site plans to attract the participation of local high school and undergraduate students. The UB site also intends to increase the number of under-represented minorities obtaining graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. CITeR meetings are expected to serve as an excellent opportunity for students to interact with potential employers to understand challenges in the field.
University at Buffalo hosted a planning grant workshop at Buffalo from June 21-22, 2012 as proposed in this Planning Grant. The workshop was advertised during the Spring 2012 meeting of CITeR at Suffolk, VA and existing CITeR members and affiliates were invited to attend the workshop at Buffalo. Invites were also sent out to potential UB site affiliates. 35 participants attended the workshop. The participants included the Directors of the CITeR sites at Clarkson and West Virginia and NSF personnel from the I/UCRC program. The Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at UB, Charles F. Zukoski, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, welcomed the participants to the Workshop. The Vice President for Research and Economic Development at UB, Alexander Cartwright, provided a broad overview of the research strength of UB faculty and outreach efforts and later also presented an overview of his research as part of faculty presentations. Other university administrators including the Associate Vice President for Research, the Associate Dean of Engineering for Research and Graduate Education, the Chair of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Director of UB’s Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach were also present. There were 10 faculty presentations proposing about 20 projects of potential interest to CITeR affiliates. UB faculty who presented were from a broad range of disciplines covering variety of topics such as Computer Science and Engineering (Fingerprints, Human monitoring, Video analytics, Keyboard dynamics, Continual authentication, Biometric fusion, Person-search using MAVs, Language as a cognitive biometric, Gestures as behavioral biometrics), Electrical Engineering (Color biometrics), Chemistry (Odor-based chemical biometrics), and Communication (Deceit detection, Violence prediction and other behavioral biometrics). Five of the seven potential industrial affiliates who had submitted their initial letter of interest were represented in the Planning Grant workshop. These include IBM, Raytheon-BBN, CUBRC, ITT-Exelis and Ultra-Scan. Amongst Government affiliates who had expressed interest, DHS and NSA were represented at the meeting. Representatives from NIST and Intel could not attend the meeting due to conflicts. The planning grant workshop also featured interesting panel discussions with current and potential affiliates as part of the Industry Workshop session. The Chair of the CITeR Industrial Affiliates Board (IAB), Chris Miles of DHS, led the discussions and the affiliates were very appreciative of the breadth of the research thrusts proposed by UB faculty. There was broad consensus that it was crucial to assess the effectiveness of biometrics technologies in application domains and for this reason it was important for CITeR to consider projects where the biometrics capabilities are tightly coupled with enabling technologies. There was also interest in novel modalities such as odor based chemical biometrics. Human monitoring, cross video matching, deceit detection and use of soft biometrics in standoff recognition applications were other projects that evinced affiliate interest. The industry workshop provided valuable insight into the research focus and broader goals that are relevant to the affiliates. NSF I/UCRC was represented at the meeting by Alex Schwarzkopf and the evaluator was David Tansik. Alex and David provided guidance to conduct the Planning Grant meeting as per I/UCRC guidelines. Alex provided a comprehensive description of the I/UCRC program to potential affiliates of the UB site and provided pointers to UB researchers on the procedures for submission of proposals and reporting at CITeR meetings. David reviewed the LIFE forms and the procedure for evaluation of projects by the IAB. Stephanie Schuckers, CITeR Director provided insights into program specifics and procedures particularly relevant to the CITeR I/UCRC.
