Florida Institute for National Security (FINS)

Biometric authentication provides a promising alternative to traditional authentication methods. Biometrics are unique physical traits (fingerprint, iris, gait, DNA, etc.) that can be presented to an electronic system as a means of confirming a user’s identity. Compared to other authentication approaches, biometrics are more conclusive and cannot be guessed or stolen as easily.

Read more at Signal Online.

“You have more applications out there relying on biometrics for identity management, and because of this, there has been a bit of a rush in deploying technology. What we’re finding is that some of the performance we expected hasn’t really been achieved yet. There’s still a lot of progress to be made in biometrics.” - Dr. Woodard

Biometric Resources

  • The Biometric Consortium, supported by NIST and the NSA, exists to facilitate scientific and technical interchanges between the U.S. Federal government and outside entities on biometric and other identity technologies.

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  • Over the last ten years or so, face recognition has become a popular area of research in computer vision and one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding.

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  • The BCOE is the FBI’s program for exploring and advancing the use of biometric technologies and capabilities for integration into operations. The BCOE strives to deliver state-of-the-art biometric tools and technologies to law enforcement and intelligence personnel around the world.

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Research Interests

Dr. Woodard's research interests include a broad range of biometric / identity science and applied artificial intelligence topics. These include but are not limited to:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Image Analysis and Machine Learning Based Hardware Assurance
  • Profiling via Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing
  • Cognitive Biometrics (Author Attribution)
  • Biometrics Enabled Hardware Security
  • Adversarial Machine Learning