Panel Discussion 1: Biometric Technology Adoption and Challenges for Seamless Border Control in ASEAN

Moderators: Dr. Wei-Yun Yau (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) and Dr. Pratit Santiprabhob (Assumption University, Thailand)

Panelists: Dr. Vutipong Areekul (Kasetsart University, Thailand), Chittipat Tongprasroeth (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Thailand), Peerapol Promwong (Chanwanich Security Printing Co.ltd., Thailand) and Azman azra bin Abdul (Ministry of Home Affairs, Malaysia)

      2015 is the year that marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with 10 nation members (i.e.; Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) with population over 610 million. The end of the year 2015 is the beginning of ASEAN Economic Community 2015 (AEC2015). The goal of AEC is to transform ASEAN into a single market and production base, a highly competitive economic region, a region of equitable economic development, and a region fully integrated into the global economy. An important issue in the AEC2015 blueprint is the free flow of skilled labour. Clearly, biometric will play an important role in AEC2015 in order to support border control as unlike Europe, each country in ASEAN will still retain the border control measure.

      This panel session will bring together several experts to share the implementation of biometric technology for border control in ASEAN and the challenges faced. This is aimed to provide researchers with motivation, research problems and real use case scenario for biometric researchers. Hopefully some of this will be addressed and presented at the future ICB. At the same time, a panel discussion will be held on how biometric technology could be further exploited to facilitate seamless cross-border identity verification for both ASEAN citizens and visitors.

Panel Session 2: Promoting High Quality Biometrics Research

Moderator: Prof. Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University, USA)

Panelists: Deepak Chandra (Google, USA), Josef Kittler (University of Surrey, UK), Brendan Klare (Noblis, USA), Stan Z. Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)

      Biometric recognition systems have undoubtedly made great strides over the past 50 years; in addition to forensics and law enforcement, they are being used at international border crossings, de-duplication for national registries (about 800 million individuals have already been enrolled in India’s Aadhaar program), mobile phone unlock and mobile payment, among others. To ensure that our academic research continues to play major role in future technological as well as scientific developments in biometrics and related disciplines, it is important that we focus on high-impact problems, develop solutions that are practically viable, report results using realistic datasets and sound evaluation protocols, and justify claims based on verifiable facts. One of the intents of the panel is to encourage researchers to publish results in the literature that have been properly evaluated and are feasible for automated or semi-automated human recognition solutions. The panel will encourage questions from the audience and foster a dialogue towards achieving this intent.