Biometric surveillance in schools : cause for concern or case for curriculum?

This article critically examines the draft consultation paper issued by the Scottish Government to local authorities on the use of biometric technologies in schools in September 2008 (see http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2008/09/08135019/0). Coming at a time when a number of schools are considering using biometric systems to register and confirm the identity of pupils in a number of settings (cashless catering systems, automated registration of pupils' arrival in school and school library automation), this guidance is undoubtedly welcome. The present focus seems to be on using fingerprints, but as the guidance acknowledges, the debate in future may encompass iris prints, voice prints and facial recognition systems, which are already in use in non-educational settings. The article notes broader developments in school surveillance in Scotland and in the rest of the UK and argues that serious attention must be given to the educational considerations which arise. Schools must prepare pupils for life in the newly emergent 'surveillance society', not by uncritically habituating them to the surveillance systems installed in their schools, but by critically engaging them in thought about the way surveillance technologies work in the wider world, the various rationales given to them, and the implications - in terms of privacy, safety and inclusion - of being a 'surveilled subject'

Predictive biometrics: A review and analysis of predicting personal characteristics from biometric data

Interest in the exploitation of soft biometrics information has continued to develop over the last decade or so. In comparison with traditional biometrics, which focuses principally on person identification, the idea of soft biometrics processing is to study the utilisation of more general information regarding a system user, which is not necessarily unique. There are increasing indications that this type of data will have great value in providing complementary information for user authentication. However, the authors have also seen a growing interest in broadening the predictive capabilities of biometric data, encompassing both easily definable characteristics such as subject age and, most recently, `higher level' characteristics such as emotional or mental states. This study will present a selective review of the predictive capabilities, in the widest sense, of biometric data processing, providing an analysis of the key issues still adequately to be addressed if this concept of predictive biometrics is to be fully exploited in the future

Optimal Iris Fuzzy Sketches

Fuzzy sketches, introduced as a link between biometry and cryptography, are a way of handling biometric data matching as an error correction issue. We focus here on iris biometrics and look for the best error-correcting code in that respect. We show that two-dimensional iterative min-sum decoding leads to results near the theoretical limits. In particular, we experiment our techniques on the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) database and validate our findings.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to the IEEE Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, 2007 Washington D

Leveraging Epidemiology to Improve Risk Assessment.

The field of environmental public health is at an important crossroad. Our current biomonitoring efforts document widespread exposure to a host of chemicals for which toxicity information is lacking. At the same time, advances in the fields of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, genetics and epigenetics are yielding volumes of data at a rapid pace. Our ability to detect chemicals in biological and environmental media has far outpaced our ability to interpret their health relevance, and as a result, the environmental risk paradigm, in its current state, is antiquated and ill-equipped to make the best use of these new data. In light of new scientific developments and the pressing need to characterize the public health burdens of chemicals, it is imperative to reinvigorate the use of environmental epidemiology in chemical risk assessment. Two case studies of chemical assessments from the Environmental Protection Agency Integrated Risk Information System database are presented to illustrate opportunities where epidemiologic data could have been used in place of experimental animal data in dose-response assessment, or where different approaches, techniques, or studies could have been employed to better utilize existing epidemiologic evidence. Based on the case studies and what can be learned from recent scientific advances and improved approaches to utilizing human data for dose-response estimation, recommendations are provided for the disciplines of epidemiology and risk assessment for enhancing the role of epidemiologic data in hazard identification and dose-response assessment

Innovation in Private Infrastructure Development Effects of the Selection Environment and Modularity

This study investigates how the selection environment and modularity affect innovation in private infrastructure development. Our findings stem from an in-depth empirical study of the extent ten process innovations were implemented in an airport expansion programme. Our findings suggest that developer and customers can each occasionally champion or resist innovations. An innovation succeeds contingent upon the capability of the stakeholder groups to develop collectively a plan to finance and implement the innovation, which reconciles subjective individual assessments. Innovations can be particularly hard to adopt when they require financing from different budgets, or when the developer’s investment pays off only if customers behave in a specified way in the future. We also find that the degrees of novelty and modularity neither represent sufficient or necessary conditions enabling or hindering innovation. Novelty, however, makes the innovation champion’s job harder because it leads to perceptions of downside risk and regulatory changes, whereas modularity helps the champion operationalise ways that moderate resistance to innovate.Innovation; financing; implementation

Age Sensitivity of Face Recognition Algorithms

This paper investigates the performance degradation of facial recognition systems due to the influence of age. A comparative analysis of verification performance is conducted for four subspace projection techniques combined with four different distance metrics. The experimental results based on a subset of the MORPH-II database show that the choice of subspace projection technique and associated distance metric can have a significant impact on the performance of the face recognition system for particular age groups