Upcoming Events

Deeply-learned face representations enable the success of current face recognition systems. Despite the ability of these representations to encode the identity of an individual, recent works have shown that more information is stored within, such as demographics, image characteristics, and social traits. This talk will show that many more soft-biometric attributes are embedding in face templates and that these attributes often have a strong correlation on the face verification performance.

Curriculum vitæ

Philipp Terhörst completed his studies in physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2017. Since then, he has been working in the Smart Living & Biometric Technologies department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (IGD) as a researcher. His research interest includes research at machine learning and biometric solutions focusing on quality assessment, privacy-enhancement, and bias-mitigation in face recognition. He is author of several publications in conferences and journals such as CVPR and IEEE Access and is regularly serving as a reviewer (e.g. for TPAMI, TIP, PR, BTAS, ICB). For his scientific work, he received several awards such as the EAB Biometrics Industry Award 2020 from the European Association for Biometrics for his dissertation or the IJCB 2020 Qualcomm PC Chairs Choice Best Student Paper Award. Moreover, he was involved in the Software Campus program, a management program of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Algorithmic decision systems have frequently been labelled as “biased”, “racist”, “sexist”, “unfair” by numerous media outlets, organisations, and researchers. Are such assessments justified? Should citizens and policymakers be concerned? What is the current state of the research? How can variation across demographic groups be quantified in evaluations of such systems? These and other related matters have recently become a hot topic in the context of biometric technologies, which are ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental applications. Biometrics represent an integral component of many surveillance, access control and operational identity management systems, thus directly or indirectly affecting billions of people all around the world.

The EAB organizes a series of virtual events with “Demographic fairness in biometric systems” as an overarching theme. The events will feature presentations by experts from academic, industry, and governmental organisations and will facilitate interactions and discussions between the experts and the audience.

The goal of the events is to raise awareness, define the problem and propose solutions and possible next steps.

A white paper will be published based on the outcomes of the virtual events.

Our confirmed speakers:

• Aythami Morales – Universidad Autónoma Madrid (UAM)
• Jacob A. Hasselgren - Maryland Test Facility (MdTF)
• John Howard – Maryland Test Facility (MdTF)
• Margherita Natali - United Nations Office on Counter Terrorism (UNOCT)
• Patrick Grother – National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• Tiago Pereira – IDIAP
• Vincent Despiegel - IDEMIA
• Yevgeniy Sirotin – Maryland Test Facility (MdTF)

Our confirmed panellists:

• Arun Vemury - U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
• Irina Orssich – European Commission (EC)
• Patrick Grother – National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• Pierre Gacon – IDEMIA
• Ramon Blanco – eu-LISA
• Silke Bargstädt-Franke – Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)
• Yevgeniy Sirotin – Maryland Test Facility (MdTF)

Sponsors of this event:

Workshop of the Biometrics Working Group of TeleTrusT, the IT Security Association in Germany

Until about 2015, there was only one dominant fingerprint technology for law enforcement applications: Optical sensors based on total reflection. In recent years, many new technologies have entered the market and have enabled new applications for fingerprint acquisition. This presentation explains the technical basics of these technologies, compares them with each other, and gives an outlook on future trends and their challenges.

Curriculum vitæ

Dirk Morgeneier graduated with Master degrees in theoretical electrotechnics as well as image processing.

He is the co-founder of JENETRIC GmbH, the experts in digital fingerprint capturing. In his position as CEO, he has been responsible for developing new technologies and products since 2014, and is known as a successful technology influencer in the industry.

For more than 20 years Dirk has been working in the biometrics industry. His ideas and developments have shaped the market over the past two decades, with a proven track record for first-in-class products. He is the man behind the well-known tenprint scanner "Guardian" and pioneer of the 1000 ppi fingerprint and palm devices. The latest innovation: by using optical transparent TFT sensors to capture fingerprints, Dirk and his team have overcome the barriers of previous technologies.

The event will focus on policy, standards, technologies and business and will be centred around three pillars:

• Digital Identity and biometrics in the banking world: the Policy landscape.
• The Biometrics technology challenges of the digital Identity verification.
• Focus on key topics and challenges.

The speaker roster will include officials from Governmental Agencies, Banking industry practitioners and well as Digital Identity and Biometrics experts. The program will include engaging with an expert panel on current challenges of digital identity verification.

More information about the event, the speaker roster and the panel composition will be provided shortly.

The use of biometrics, and in particular of fingerprints, is increasing day by day. Not only are we required to give our fingerprints in order to obtain a passport, but now we can also use them in a daily basis for other tasks such as unlocking our smartphones or confirming a bank transaction or payment. In spite of the numerous benefits of utilising fingerprints instead of PINs or passwords, some drawbacks come with this technology: you do not need to be a tech expert to carry out a presentation attack that may fool the system into believing you are someone else. We thus need to raise awareness about this issue and the current efforts of the biometric community, including academia, operators, and vendors, in order to minimise the impact of such attacks. We will thus present a definition of the problem and provide the audience with possible solutions and a look into the future steps.

This workshop will feature presentations by experts from academic, industry, and governmental organisations and will facilitate interactions and discussions between the experts and the audience.

Our confirmed speakers:

• Jascha Kolberg – Hochschule Darmstadt (HDA)
• Marta Gomez-Barrero – Hochschule Ansbach (HSA)
• Stephanie Schuckers – Clarkson University
• More to be announced

GOLD sponsor of this event:

IWBF is an international forum devoted to facilitating synergies in research and development among the areas of multimedia forensics, forensic biometrics, and forensic science. State-of-the-art research in areas such as biometrics, forensic science, surveillance, and multimedia forensics will be presented. The 9th edition of IWBF will be a meeting place for those concerned with the use of advanced biometric technologies in forensic applications, attracting participants from industry, research, academia, and end-users.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Biometrics
• Attacks to biometric recognition systems
• Multimodal biometrics
• Soft biometrics
• Mobile biometrics
• Biometric analysis of crime scenes
• Forensic Science
• Multimedia forensics
• Integrity verification
• Anonymization & Data Privacy
• Data de-identification
• Surveillance
• Ethical and societal implications
• Information Theoretic Security
• Adversarial Signal Processing
• Case studies on the aforementioned topics

The Norwegian Biometrics Forum (NBF) is an open platform dedicated to regular exchange of information and experience related to the field of Biometrics. The target of the group is the interdisciplinary discussion between research, technology developers, data privacy experts, governmental agencies and operators of Biometric Systems. In the regular meetings new applications, latest research results and products are presented.

From the early days, when security was the driving force behind biometric research, today’s challenges go far beyond security. Machine learning, Image understanding, Signal analysis, Neuroscience, Robotics, Forensic science, Digital forensics and other disciplines, converged in a truly multidisciplinary effort to devise and build advanced systems to facilitate the interpretation of signals recorded from individuals acting in a given environment. This is what we simply call today “Biometrics”.

For the last eighteen years, the International Summer School on Biometrics has been closely following the developments in science and technology to offer a cutting edge, intensive training course, always up to date with the current state-of-the-art.

What are the most up-to-date core biometric technologies developed in the field? What is the potential impact of biometrics in forensic investigation and crime prevention? What can we learn from human perception? How to deploy current Deep Learning approaches? How to deal with adversarial attacks in biometric recognition?

This school follows the successful track of the International Summer Schools on Biometrics held since 2003. In this 18th edition, the courses will mainly focus on new and emerging issues:

• The impact of AI in Biometrics and Biometrics in AI;
• How to make “Deep Biometrics” systems explainable;
• Biometrics for social interactions and emerging applications;
• How to exploit new biometric technologies in forensic and security applications.

The courses will provide a clear and in-depth picture on the state-of-the-art in biometric verification/identification technology, both under the theoretical and scientific point of view as well as in diverse application domains. The lectures will be given by, at least, 18 outstanding experts in the field, from both academia and industry.

An advanced feature of this summer school will be some practical sessions to better understand, “hands on”, the real potential of today’s biometric technologies.

Workshop of the Biometrics Working Group of TeleTrusT, the IT Security Association in Germany

The 8^th edition of the EAB Research Projects Conference will take place as virtual conference from 13 to 15 September 2021. The conference is organized by the European Association on Biometrics (EAB) in cooperation with the Joint Research Center (DG JRC) of the European Commission, through its Cyber and Digital Citizens’ security Unit. The EAB-RPC 2021 will be co-located with the EAB Biometrics Research, Industry and Max-Snijder-Awards and the IEEE BIOSIG Conference, later that same week.

The conference is currently the largest event on research funded by the European Union in the area of Biometrics and Identity Management. Over the previous successful editions, EAB-RPC has become the main forum in Europe where attendees can simultaneously: promote research carried out in biometrics, forge new links and networks, and identify the appropriate partners for possible future project applications. Last year’s edition welcomed over 100 participants from academia, industry and public institutions.

We thank our partners:

All members of EAB are invited to join us for our annual General Assembly.

EAB is launching the fifteen European Biometric Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards. These prestigious awards are granted annually to individuals who have been judged by a panel of internationally respected experts to be making a significant contribution to the field of biometrics research in Europe.

GOLD sponsor of this event:

This seminar aims to provide an opportunity to learn first-hand from world-leading experts both the basics of biometric systems and also the latest developments across the community. It is aimed at a wide range of stakeholders including industrial and governmental developers and end-users, researchers, academics and post-graduate students, and policy makers.

Gold sponsor of this event:

The BIOSIG 2020 conference addresses current issues in the area of biometrics and will present innovations and best practices that can be transferred into future applications.

Back in spring 2011 our Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory (NBL) was established and for the opening we organized a workshop. Since then we have celebrated the NBL Annual Workshops (NBLAW). All the workshops are listed on the NBL homepage.

All times refer to CET.