Engagement - Listening to Industy, Contributing Through Applied Research

The purpose of the lab and our group is to provide industry the ability to partner with academia on issues that they face. Our research is governed by the needs of industry. Our participation in standards development has enabled us to work on research projects that are relevant to industry, and provide input back to the relevant standards committees. This works on a similar model to that presented by Fernando Podio at the Biometrics Authentication Symposium in Kyoto, Japan.

engagement
Figure 1: Partnership Among Researchers, Industry and Users and Standards Adoption (Podio, 2006)

This approach leads to standardized solutions hopefully adopted by the customers and shows that standard bodies can feed knowledge gained back to technology developers and researchers. Researchers, through Academia and Industrial partnerships can participate in providing research results into the standards development process. This can be done across various standards activities, including:

  • Testing and Evaluation
  • Biometric Equipment Performance
  • Biometric Image Quality
  • Biometrics and E-Authentication

For example, the Biometric Performance Testing and Reporting – Modality Specific Testing is an ongoing effort to provide two-way feedback between standards bodies and industry / academia on modality specific testing (through National Body experts). Some research questions include “what are the factors that influence performance” and “what are their effects on the resulting performance”? We are active in biometric standards, both nationally and internationally. Our lab also hosts the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC37 Biometric Vocabulary e-corpus which you can search on for specific biometric terms.

Our lab also specializes in the testing and evaluation of products - each semester we collected data for a number of funded and unfunded projects. Our main focus is to be "industry facing". The reason for this research is simple: for biometrics to become pervasive in society, we need to understand the performance of biometrics across all segments of society, not just those that are easy to collect. We have done a wide range of performance evaluations for a number of organizations.

Our group is also partnered with a number of centers and academic departments on campus. If we don’t have the specific expertise - we can partner up with other faculty across campus. Our Purdue University partner faculty are in a number of disciplines, from Computer Science, Engineering, Management and Technology.

If you would like to initiate a project with us, please let us know. To contact someone in the lab, please use email. The address is elliott@purdue.edu or the specific researcher that you are interested in contacting. If you need to call, the best way to leave a message is with the Department of Industrial Technology at (765) 494 1101/1088. If the project involves data collection, then we will need to get approval from our Institutional Review Board, prior to the commencement of data collection. It is always best to initiate a project at the beginning of the semester. We typically plan out the research schedule midway through August, and then again in December.

The lab is also focused on academics and ties research (discovery) and industry (engagement) back into the curriculum at every opportunity. Classes are updated each semester, and relate to industrial problems. We have a number of speakers from industry visiting the lab, and teaching classes to students.  Currently three courses are taught in the lab; IT 345 Automatic Identification and Data Capture, IT 545 Biometric Technologies and Applications, TECH 621 AIDC for the Enterprise, and IT 560 Manufacturing and Supply Chain Security Technologies.

As part of our mission of engagement, our group presents to local community groups and runs workshops to introduce people to the potential of biometrics technologies. Recent activities include presenting a workshop on Biometric Technologies at the AIDCTI at Ohio University; running workshops for high school and minority students under the Biometrics....Bio-what? program, as well as introducing local businesses to the advantages of biometrics at recent New Economy Network Meetings in Lafayette, and TechPoint Summit in Indianapolis. If you would like our group to make a presentation or demonstrate the biometrics equipment we have in the lab, please feel free to contact Dr. Elliott at elliott@purdue.edu.