In the future, travelers may need more than a passport to verify identification at border checkpoints — they may be required to present their fingerprints. And identifying disguised terrorists will likely become easier with the use of sensors that process discriminative facial features.
Believe it or not, these seemingly far-off ideas are nearing reality. At West Virginia University (WVU), Dr. Mayank Vatsa and Dr. Richa Singh are developing a biometric system that can intelligently perform recognition the way humans do.
"Humans effortlessly process information obtained from multiple sensory inputs," Vatsa said. "Inspired from the human capabilities of recognizing individuals, biometric technology uses different modalities such as face, fingerprint, iris and signature to recognize an individual."
Vatsa and Singh, who obtained their master's and doctorate degrees from WVU in computer science with an emphasis in biometrics, were required to study multiple disciplines to develop their recognition system.
One of their projects was to develop a system that recognizes individuals who have aged. This involved multiple fields: image processing, computer vision, information fusion, pattern recognition and machine learning. The result was a system that would help identify missing children after several years had elapsed.
For their fingerprint identification research, the pair's main objective was to develop a fast and accurate verification system that incorporates multilevel fingerprint features. They created an algorithm to extract details such as edge, noise and smoothness from the fingerprint to improve the accuracy of the correlation. This is the technology that Vatsa said could be used at border checkpoints.
Although it's not an impossible reality, Vatsa said the techniques he and Singh developed will require time and effort to convert into commercial systems. The two are currently in India and plan to join an academic institution to continue their biometric research.
Robert Laflamme wants to make a quantum leap. This year, the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) received a $50 million grant from the Canadian federal government. Laflamme, IQC's director, plans to use half of the money to upgrade to a new facility that combines quantum computing research with nanotechnology, and the other half "to attract the best minds in the world," he said.
In the field of information science, the quantum computer is considered the holy grail. With modern computers, the basic building block is a digital bit, which can only take the form of either zero or one. But a quantum computer encodes information as quantum bits (qubits), which are not limited to two states. A qubit can be both zero and one at the same time, which gives a quantum computer the potential to perform calculations and process tasks at levels beyond a silicon-based computer. This technology would also open the door to more complex systems of communication and cryptography.
But figuring out how to read the qubit is the hard part; it is the reason why, even after 30 years, quantum computing is still in its infancy.
"Quantum computers remain quantum as long as they're isolated from the environment," Laflamme said. "When you touch a qubit, it loses its quantumness. We have to harness it so it's on the path we want it to go."
At IQC, founded in 2002, Laflamme's group has been using magnetic resonance technology and has produced 12 qubits, which is not enough to build a computer. But with the new building and world-class researchers, Laflamme sees a breakthrough on the horizon.
"If we can build a quantum computer, we could solve problems that have been mind-boggling," he said. "It has applications to understand what the world is made of."
