Marina Gavrilova, Advancements and New Developments in Biometric Privacy, Security and Ethics

Human identity recognition is one of the key mechanisms of ensuring proper asset and information access to individuals. It became an established authentication practice for government, consumer, financial and recreational institutions in modern society. Biometrics are also increasingly used in a cybersecurity context to mitigate vulnerabilities and to ensure protection against an unauthorized access. However, with the rise of the technological advancements, such as AI and deep learning, more and more capabilities exist to infer private information of individuals and to use aggregate data mining for commercial or other purposes. This lecture will discuss how deep learning methods can enhance biometric recognition accuracy in a variety of settings: unimodal and multi-modal systems, social behavioral biometrics, and risk assessment. The lecture will further focus on risks of privacy and ethical considerations, with discussing cancellability and de-identification as two of the mechanisms to mitigate the privacy concerns. About the speaker: Prof. Gavrilova holds Full Professor with Tenure appointment at the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Canada. Prof. Gavrilova research interests lie in the areas of machine intelligence, biometric recognition, image processing and GIS. Prof. Gavrilova publication list includes over 150 journal and conference papers, edited special issues, books and book chapters, including World Scientific Bestseller of the Month (2007) – "Image Pattern Recognition: Synthesis and Analysis in Biometric," Springer book (2009) "Computational Intelligence: A Geometry-Based Approach" and IGI book (2013) "Multimodal Biometrics and Intelligent Image Processing for Security Systems". She has received support from CFI, NSERC, GEOIDE, MITACS, PIMS, Alberta Ingenuity, NATO and other funding agencies. She is an Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Computational Sciences Springer Verlag Journal series and on Editorial board of seven journals.