PREMIA (Singapore) - Short Course on Biometrics

Security has all along been important in business, government, the military, and in everyday life. Nowadays it is paramount. More and more, biometrics is being used for security purposes. Technologies like face recognition, fingerprint scans, iris recognition are increasingly being deployed because they offer greater convenience, speed, and accuracy.

This one-day module examines these issues, and more, with the aim of providing a good layman understanding of biometrics. The intended audience: business managers, IT end-users, real estate agents, facility managers, insurers, security professionals and anyone wanting a better understanding of biometrics.

Dr. Terence Sim is Assistant Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. His research is primarily in face recognition, machine learning, pattern recognition, as well as biometrics. His work in these areas has given him deep insights into the capabilities and weaknesses of biometric systems. Dr. Sim is Chairman of the Workgroup on Cross-Jurisdictional and Societal Aspects of the Biometrics Technical Committee (part of the IT Standards Committee) which recommends industry standards for biometrics systems in Singapore. He also sits in the Security and Privacy Standards Technical Committee, as well as a member of the Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association of Singapore, affiliated with the International Association of Pattern Recognition. Dr. Sim obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, M.Sc from Stanford University, and S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tsim

Tentative Schedule for Module 1

This two-day module explains the details of biometrics technologies. It begins with the fundamental topic that underlies all types of biometrics, i.e. pattern recognition, and then explores in depth several types of biometrics, namely, face recognition, fingerprint recognition, and voice recognition. The course will also cover an advanced topic: fusion of multimodal biometrics.

Intended audience: managers and engineers who wish to understand the bits and bytes of biometrics, or who wish to implement/customize their own biometrics solution.

Course Instructors:

· Dr. Terence Sim, School of Computing, National University of Singapore

· Dr. Yau Wei Yun, Institute for Infocomm Research

· Dr. Li Haizhou, Institute for Infocomm Research

About the Instructors:

Dr. Terence Sim (see Dr. Sim’s biodata in the description for “Understanding Biometrics”)

Dr. Yau Wei Yun received his B.Eng (Electrical) from the National University of Singapore (1992), the M.Eng degree in biomedical image processing (1995) and PhD degree in computer vision (1999) from the Nanyang Technological University. From 1997 to 2002, he was a Research Engineer and then Program Manager at the Centre for Signal Processing, Singapore leading the research and development effort in biometrics signal processing. His team won the top 3 positions in both speed and accuracy at the international Fingerprint Verification Competition 2000 (FVC2000). Wei-Yun served as the Program Director of the Biometrics Enabled Mobile Commerce (BEAM) Consortium from 2001 to 2002. Currently, he holds concurrent position as Assistant Professor at the Nanyang Technological University and as Senior Scientist with the Institute for Infocomm Research, leading the research in multi-modal biometrics. He is also currently the Chair of the Biometrics Technical Committee, Singapore, Chair of the Asian Biometric Forum and project editor of the international standards ISO/IEC JTC1 SC37 29794-4 on fingerprint quality score normalization and co-editor for ISO/IEC JTC1 SC37 29794-1. Wei-Yun is also the recipient of the TEC Innovator Award 2002, the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors’ Award 2003 (Merit), Standards Council Merit Award 2005 and IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Awards 2006. His research interest includes biometrics, video understanding and intelligent systems and has published widely, with 3 patents granted and 70 publications in these areas.

Dr Haizhou Li received the B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in electrical & electronic engineering from the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in 1984, 1987 and 1990, respectively. He was a Research Assistant from 1988 to 1990 at the University of Hong Kong. In 1990, he joined SCUT as an Associate Professor where he became a full Professor in 1994. From 1994 to 1995, he was a Visiting Professor at Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy (CRIN), France. In 1995, he became the Manager of the ASR group at the Apple-ISS Research Centre in Singapore where he led the research of Apple’s Chinese Dictation Kit for Macintosh. In 1999, he was appointed as the Research Director of Lernout & Hauspie Asia Pacific, where he oversaw the creation of the world’s first multimodal speech, pen and keyboard input solution for Chinese computing. From 2001 to 2003, he was the Vice President of InfoTalk Corp. Ltd in Singapore. Since 2003, he has been with the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore, where he is now the head of media processing department. He is also an adjunct Associate Professor of School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Dr Li’s current research interests include automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, spoken language recognition, and natural language processing. He led the I2R team to achieve leading performance in NIST Language Recognition, Speaker Recognition, and Rich Transcription international benchmarkings in 2005, 2006, and 2007. He was a recipient of the National Infocomm Award 2001 and the TEC Innovator’s Award 2004 in Singapore. He is now the Vice President of the COLIPS, Senior Member of IEEE, Executive Committee Member of Asian Federation of NLP, and a Member of ACL.

Tentative Schedule for Module 1

Tentative Schedule for Module 2