Swedish National Biometric Association

Upcoming International Biometrics events

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 02:29:52 +0000

Biometrics Institute Technology Showcase & Exhibition
November 30, 2011
Hotel Realm, Canberra, Australia

11th Annual AAAE/TSA/DHS Aviation Security Summit
December 12-13, 2011
Arlington, Virginia

Security Document World
May 22-23, 2012
London, UK

The All-New BiometricProducts.info is launched by Swedish Biometric Association

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:41 +0000

An All-New Biometric Products Reference Site

Swedish National Biometric Association (SNBA) has launched the all-new, free, online, and mobile-friendly BiometricProducts.info which is as an initiative by SNBA and its co-founding member Optimum Biometric Labs. The free service fully supports the purpose of SNBA which is to bring the market and the industry closer together.

BiometricProducts.info is an internet destination for customers where they can search and obtain relevant and meaningful information about biometric products for assisting them in their planning and procurement decisions. What is unique with BiometricProducts.info is its approach of creating one homogeneous and uniformed profile that contains useful properties and attributes about biometric-related products. The service is completely free to access and use and for vendors, or anyone they designate, to register information on products.

“Just looking at its mission, I think BiometricProducts.info is a major contribution to the biometric market and industry. To fulfill its mission, it has a very solid and well-thought core structure, has powerful social media capabilities, is easy to use and manage, has a great look & feel, and is mobile-optimized. On top of these features, we truly have a dream-team of International Expert Advisory Panel who lead us to optimize and maintain the quality and performance of mission and dissemination of this service. I sincerely encourage vendors to register their products and enthusiasts to spread the word so we can get the ball rolling and develop the service into a popular discovery and reference place for customers and prospects in the market for biometric products.”, says Babak Goudarzi Pour, Chairman of SNBA and Creator of the Biometric Products Info.

Mission

The primary task of Biometric Products Info is to assist customers in their planning and procurement decisions by serving as a knowledge base and reference about biometrics related products. The service aims to organize essential product information in a format it has established called Product Information Profile.

For Who

Biometric Products Info is intended primarily for biometrics end-users and customers but can also be used by everyone with any interest in biometrics and biometric products.

By Who

Biometric Products Info grows based on product registrations by the vendors or anyone they designate for this task. Learn how to submit a Biometric Product Information Profile.

How it works

Biometric Products Info is essentially a collection of Product Information Profiles that each contains a product’s name, description, type, modality, intended applications, ROI-analysis, reference-case examples, applied standards, received certifications or awards, and diverse vendor information such as social media channels, product demo and videos, and more. For users, there are 5 ways to search the service to find products.

Three ways to register products at BiometricProducts.info

As a product vendor you can either:

Register your products yourself (see How to Submit a Biometric Product Information Profile)
Have Optimum Biometric Labs to register your products (the company has launched a dedicated service for this task)
Have anyone you designate (such as partners, resellers, etc.) to register your products

The advantages with 2 and 3 are:

You save time
Beside the registration, you get an independent evaluation and feedback regarding availability, accessibility, and ease of finding significant information about your products

Just released: Best Practices in Biometrics Performance Monitoring Programs

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 07:00:13 +0000

It all started, back in 2002, as an ambitious master’s thesis project performed by the co-founders of Optimum Biometric Labs and presented at the Biometric Identification short course at the UCLA Extension held by Dr. James L. Wayman.

Almost 10 R&D years later in a convergence area between several IT disciplines (e.g. biometrics, application performance monitoring, event correlation and analysis), Optimum Biometric Labs packages and releases its know-how and experience in this Best Practices in Biometrics Performance Monitoring Programs.

This Best Practices is concerned with the use of standards, methods, processes, frameworks, and IT tools to support end-users’ and businesses’ expectations associated with Reliability,Availability, Maintainability, and Performance of biometric-based verification and identification systems and applications.

Biometrics Performance Monitoring (BPM) is using real-time data to detect, diagnose,report, and recover issues, or potential issues, in order to ensure that end-customers’ business goals and requirements are met or exceeded.

“We want to celebrate our 10 years progress in Biometrics Performance Monitoring by sharing our know-how with the biometric industry and the end-user community. I think the time is finally right to raise the awareness and bring focus in this important (but until now unclear) area because customers in the market for biometrics should be demanding higher quality of biometrics systems, applications, and services (in terms of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Performance) while keeping the operational costs (such as downtime, maintenance, malfunctions) at a minimum.”, says Babak Goudarzi Pour co-author of this work, CEO and a BPM Evangelist at Optimum Biometric Labs.

Dedicated Web Portal

For the purpose of world-wide dissemination of and collaboration in this Best Practices, Optimum Biometric Labs has launched a dedicated web portal where the Best Practices document and a number of useful supporting material can be found: www.BiometricsPerformanceMonitoring.Org

Creating a new product category

With introduction of this Best Practices, Optimum Biometrics Labs wants to formally create a new category of products called Biometrics Performance Monitoring (BPM) tools. “We haven’t invented the concept, but we have developed it along with the first specialized, stand-alone, and off-the-shelf software tool in the market for managing the concept (see BioUptime)”, says Babak Goudarzi Pour.

He further emphasizes: ”We greatly welcome competition and collaboration to expand this opportunity and discipline. In the market place any given biometric deployment is in fact mission critical when it needs to perform its task for its users and business owner; whether that installation is an Automated Border Control system or a biometric school lunch system”.

New On-Site Course, Book yours at BCC 2011

In conjunction with this release the company now offers this Best Practices as an on-site short course (starting from October 31) which will be brought to customer’s workplace or any preferred location. That this course is on-site has many attractive advantages:

Cost (and time) savings by eliminating participant (e.g. employees) travel expenses
Convenient location access and time flexibility to fit employees’ schedule
Option to have room for a greater number of participants
Allow for open discussions among participants (e.g. employees)

For interested companies and organizations, there are two simple ways to book this lecture:

By meeting us at BCC 2011 in Tampa, FL (September 27-29), we are at Booth # 211 with our partner AFIS and Biometrics Consulting Inc. Babak will go around to meet with vendors and to share a ticket with QR-code for easy access to the lecture’s information page and for registering early interest from smart phones and tablets.
By contacting Babak Goudarzi Pour: Phone (USA): +1 714 609 4815, Phone (Sweden and Europe): +46 707 404 623, Skype: random_precision

About Optimum Biometric Labs: Founded in 2003 in Sweden, Optimum Biometric Labs develops, markets, and sells BioUptime which is a monitoring software for supervising infrastructure reliability, availability, maintainability, and performance. BioUptime monitors critical hardware and software elements and subsystem components such as biometric capture devices, applications, services, usage, and more. The product’s key benefits enable customers to 1) measure, meet and exceed service level agreements 2) reduce maintenance and operational costs, 3) maximize operational performance, reliability, and availability. Optimum Biometric Labs also specializes in biometrics and BioUptime-related professional services.

Steria acquires SNBA member Innitor Biosystems AB

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 20:12:57 +0000

Steria acquires SNBA member the Swedish biometric company Innitor Biosystems AB based in Hultsfred, Sweden.

New AFIS technology available from Steria

28.07.2011

Fredrik Faleby

Steria has aquired the biometric company Innitor Biosystems AB from Hultsfred, Sweden.

Steria will strengthen its position in the biometric market by beeing able to deliver complete solutions from biometric booking and capture solutions to high speed central AFIS solutions.

Innitor Biosystems has patented technology for performing high speed matching with the use of standard server hardware. This will enable Steria to offer a new generation of AFIS to a competetive price.

The aqusition was finalized July 1st. 2011

Source: Steria Biometrics
Via: LinkedIn group: Biometrics Network and Forum

Special Report on the SC37 Meetings in Kyoto by Cathy Tilton

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:18:00 +0000

Planet Biometrics has published a Special Report on the latest SC37 Meetings in Kyoto.

Thanks Cathy Tilton for this SC37 meeting compilation.

Source: Planet Biometrics

Biometrics Use Cases in Schools (K-12) in the United States, Desert Sands Unified School District, La Quinta, California

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:57:09 +0000

Interview and report conducted by Optimum Biometric Labs (Irvine, California, July 2011)

This report can be downloaded here: Biometric Use Case Study, Desert Sand School District

School District Snapshot (2011)

Desert Sands Unified School District, DSUSD

Based in La Quinta, California

http://www.dsusd.us/dsusd

34 schools (20 Elementary schools, 7 Middle schools, 7 High schools)

2,384 Employees/Faculty

28,687 students enrolled

Use Case One Snapshot

Biometric application: Biometrics for School lunch lines (K-12 food service environment)

Biometrics used: fingerprint

Use case period: installation started as trial and now is permanent

Number of users: Approx. 400 students (out of 820)

Products and suppliers: PAD+ 3-in-1 Input Device from SL-Tech, School-Link Technologies, http://www.sl-tech.net

Yesterday’s Challenges and Goals
For the Desert Sands Unified School District, DSUSD, the idea of applying biometrics for the school lunch lines came from a great combination of requirements and goals several years ago. They wanted to eliminate identity fraud by using cutting edge technology in order to boost PR and at the same time increase convenience and help students that forgot their student ID card. The previous identification method was based on the traditional student ID card and PIN code.

Today’s Result
Compared to the traditional identification methods used previously, the advantage with DSUSD biometric solution for the school lunch lines is versatile: quicker lunch service since each ID transaction is performed faster, minimized potential fraud since the person needs to be physically present, and no need for students to remember their PIN number or bringing their ID card. (Reporter’s note: we could feel the hightech-ness factor in the air when we entered the beautiful school district’s HQ and its surrounding area in the all fresh and new Palm Desert and La Quinta).

The school lunch system is comprised of a server software and several scanners (model: PAD+ 3-in-1 Input Device from SL-Tech) and serve 820 students of who around 400 have opted in to the biometric option. Here is how it works in short: after selecting a meal a student scans his/her finger on the input device which simply performs a one-to-many match (identification in its list of templates) and if matched it sends the student PIN to the back-end software for processing, the input device then receives the information. The biometric identification process takes 1-2 seconds.

Privacy is ensured by storing only the scanned templates on the database and not the fingerprint images. Those students who have not opted in for the biometric program can still enter their PIN number or swipe their ID card into the same input device. In terms of availability, reliability, and performance requirements, the complete 3-in-1 solution system must be operational and perform as intended during normal cafeteria hours which is around two hours per day.

Future Improvements
For the DSUSD biometric lunch system, Marta Shand, Nutrition Services Site Manager, would like to see improvement in decreasing the time and labour to setting up and managing the system by automatic synchronization of the records in order to eliminate the need for manual synchronization between the scanners.Additionally, Optimum Biometric Labs suggested monitoring of system availability and performance to improve the biometric lunch system by using the following features:

Sending alert notifications to the system administrator as soon as an input device or any other hardware and software component fails or not performing as expected. This will result in minimizing potential downtime and maximizing quality of service and user experience.
Tracking relevant system metrics in order to measure the performance on overall and on individual scanner level for easier maintenance and optimization of the system along with more efficient user instructions and management (for example: re-enrollment due to template aging or other factors).

Use Case Two Snapshot

Biometric application: System Tracks Students Riding Buses

Biometrics used: fingerprint

Use case period: Trial started October 2010, ended June 2011

Number of users: 84 students per day on 2 buses

Operational hours: morning and afternoon shifts, 2 hours per drive and biometric device

Products and suppliers: Biometric Observation Security System (BOSS) from Global Biometrics Security

Video link: http://www.kesq.com/news/25832887/detail.html

Result: For the biometric school bus system, the software and hardware is in the development stages and needs additional fine tuning to operate as desired. The district expressed an interest in the integration of this program with routing software. The ultimate goal of the system is to enable the school administration to know where the kids are, where the buses are, and to maximize bus usage efficiency.

Precise Biometrics achieves fastest result in MINEX II Evaluation

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:06:55 +0000

As the results from the MINEX II test is released, Precise Biometrics emerges with the fastest standardized Match-on-Card technology showing outstanding performance. Precise Biometrics is the only biometric supplier who passed with 3 different card vendors – a unique achievement in the industry. MINEX II is a key standard for US federal ID implementations.

MINEX II is a test that assesses fingerprint Match-on-Card technology and is performed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Precise Match-on-Card™ achieved the fastest result and reached top ranking accuracy scores on three separate smart card platforms. MINEX stands for Minutiae Interoperability Exchange.

Precise Biometrics is the only biometric supplier that has passed the performance requirements with three different smart card vendor submissions – Gemalto, Giesecke & Devrient, and SPYRUS. All three submissions passed with nearly identical, outstanding results; while the submission with SPYRUS proved to be the fastest overall of any vendor in the test.

This successful result together with three smart card vendors is a unique achievement in the biometric industry. It shows that Precise Match-on-Card™ functions independently of smart card and it gives Precise Biometrics a unique position to offer unparalleled options and flexibility for upcoming Match-on-Card deployments in the US government.

New developments show that MINEX II will be a key in upcoming Federal ID programs. The US government deploys Personal Identity Verification (PIV) which specifies the identification process of employees. NIST has issued proposed amendments to the Federal Information Processing Standard 201 (FIPS 201) that defines the PIV credential. The amendment states that Match-on-Card now is an approved authentication mechanism for the PIV smart cards. Also, a new Presidential Directive calls for all Federal agencies to immediately develop and issue an implementation policy for PIV. Through this policy, each agency will require operational use of the previously-issued PIV smart card credential as the common means of authentication for access to the agency’s facilities, networks, and information systems starting 2012.

These two developments will lead to a significant new market for Precise Biometrics that includes 5.7 million users in the U.S. government who soon will be required to use PIV smart cards for secure access. Match-on-Card biometric authentication provides the highest level of assurance that the PIV card belongs to the card-holder seeking access.
Thomas Marschall, CEO and President at Precise Biometrics, comments on the great results:
“Precise Biometrics continues to be the market leader for Match-on-card. We have the highest number of deployed Match-on-Card licenses in the world and with these top-ranked MINEX II results we are very well positioned for the PIV market. We expect the PIV market to grow extensively with this new presidential directive, and we also expect to see PIV extending beyond U.S. Federal ID programs. As such, we estimate the PIV market demand to be 15-20 million people within the next 3-4 years.” says Marschall.

Source: Precise Biometrics

BioUptime/BIMS, BCC 2010 demo from Optimum Biometric Labs

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:34:14 +0000

SNBA Chairman to give keynote at SKYDD 2010 i Stockholm

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:50:07 +0000

Babak Goudarzi Pour, Chairman of SNBA, will give a presentation on September 15, 2010, at the largest security conference and exhibition in Scandinavia taking place in Stockholm, Sweden. The title of the keynote is “Biometrics – a natural part of everyday life” (Swedish: Biometri – en naturlig del av vardagen). For more information please visit the following program link:

http://www.delegia.com/app/attendee/default.asp?pageId=11149&seminarId=22390

SNBA Chairman to lecture at skydd 2008

Babak Goudarzi Pour — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 05:32:45 +0000

SNBA Chairman and Optimum Biometric Labs CEO, Babak Goudarzi Pour, is appointed to give a lecture on “What happens in the biometrics market?” at Skydd 2008 Conference.