BiometricsAI

BiometricsAI is UAM research group located in the School of Engineering (Escuela Politecnica Superior) focused on signal and image processing, AI fundamentals and applications, HCI, forensics, and biometrics for security and human behavior analysis. BiometricsAI has been and is involved in multiple national and EU projects in these topics, e.g., FP6 BIOSECURE, FP7 TABULA RASA, and FP7 BEAT in the past; and more recently in H2020 IDEA-FAST, H2020 PRIMA, and H2020 TRESPASS-ETN (in the last 10 years BiometricsAI has attracted more than 3 million euros with these projects). Main achievements are mainly in: 1) adaptive information fusion with application to biometrics and AI in general, 2) dealing with varying signal/data quality, 3) dealing with problematic users in biometrics by exploiting their user-specificities, 4) handwriting and touchscreen biometrics, 5) generation of multimodal biometric datasets, and 6) security and privacy related to personal biometric information, including attacks and defenses to biometrics and AI systems in general. BiometricsAI usually communicates in top venues related to biometrics and AI, e.g., confs. like AAAI, CVPR, ECCV, ICPR, IJCB, ICDAR; and journals like T-PAMI (highest JCR Impact Factor journal on AI), IEEE Trans. on Inf. Forensics and Security (highest IF journal on Security, BiometricsAI director was Assoc. Ed.), IEEE Trans. on Image Processing (BiometricsAI director was also Assoc. Ed.), and Information Fusion (3rd highest IF journal on AI, BiometricsAI director was Assoc. Ed.). BiometricsAI also participates in many research cooperation initiatives like COST (continuously since 2002), multiple scientific networks related to the IEEE and to the IAPR (members of the Governing Board), and ELLIS since 2020 (one Fellow and three Members). BiometricsAI has received best papers awards at AVBPA, ICB, IJCB, ICPR, ICPRS, and Pattern Recognition Letters, and a number of world-class research distinctions, including the Miguel Catalan Award to the Best Researcher under 40 in the Community of Madrid in the general area of Science and Technology, and the IAPR Young Biometrics Investigator Award 2017, given to a single researcher worldwide every two years under the age of 40, whose research work has had a major impact in biometrics. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIETY: BiometricsAI has engineering contributions with industrial impact, e.g., A) leading handwriting biometrics technology transferred to Cecabank (now in use in many bank branches); B) BEAT testing platform including security standards developed in cooperation with the Spanish Ministry of Defense; C) technology developed in IDEA-FAST in cooperation with the health industry (Pfizer, Lilly, Janssen, etc.) for tracking neurodegenerative diseases based on biometrics; D) biometrics and behavior recognition for assessing remote education (edBB platform); and E) a new CAPTCHA system exploiting biometric information for improved bot detection. In total, BiometricsAI has attracted more than 1 million euro with these contracts. BiometricsAI has also carried out outreach activities and dissemination at large, being featured in the last 10 years many times in general and technology-oriented media (e.g., Telemadrid, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, Telediario RTVE, WIRED, Forbes, BBC, IEEE Spectrum, CNN, Euronews, etc.) MENTORSHIP AND SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY: BiometricsAI has generated 16 PhDs since 2005 and currently hosts 10 PhD students. Other BiometricsAI research service includes (linking biometrics and AI): General Chairs of CIARP 2018 and IbPRIA 2019; Chairs (Program or Area) of 13 key confs.; Reviewers for 70+ IEEE and IAPR confs.; Reviewers in many journals; and Reviewer for multiple research grants.