Interview Darrin Reilly, Motorola Inc.

Feature Company

Interview with Darrin Reilly, Vice President and General Manager
Biometrics Business unit, Motorola Inc.

March 2006

Identity Management solutions have become an increasingly important area for biometrics, especially as they relate to border control and e-passports. Can you provide us with an update on Motorola's involvement in this area?

Motorola's involvement in this area is really an extension on the number of systems that we have implemented over the years, so we are expanding and leveraging our previous passport and identity projects. For example there is a project that we implemented in Guatemala several years ago. We have an identity management project for welfare recipients in the State of California and we have a number of border control solutions throughout the world, so from a portfolio standpoint we are simply leveraging what we have. We are scaling our back end servers to be able to handle much larger record data bases and we are broadening, either via equity investments or eco-system partnerships, to incorporate secure credentials into the overall solutions, be it in e-passports, plastics, cards and things of that nature.

You recently introduced Fused Scoring Logic. Can you describe the benefits of this new innovation for us?

The Fused Scoring Logic which we actually showcased at the Biometric 2005 Conference in London in the fall enabled us to look at not only the quality and the capture of the data from a fingerprint but also looking at a 3D facial image and a 2D facial image to triangulate the scoring logic affiliated with each one of those captures -- the 3D, the 2D facials and the fingerprint to provide a better accuracy level of identification confidence in our system solutions.

Is this something that you are finding your customer base is asking for?

Well it is twofold. A lot of customers definitely are asking for 2D face and finger and as most of them are getting more educated they are looking at understanding the advantages of 3D face that takes 2D to the next level. So I say it is a combination of them asking as well as us providing more of a leadership in the market and the advantages of supplying additional capture and matching criteria. The advantages of multi-biometrics and Fusion are that no single biometric can quickly cover the entire population in applications such ePassports where the goal is to speedily yet accurately process thousands of people through an airport without abnormally delaying them (for example some people have bad fingerprints). In addition, every biometric modality has a upper limit on its performance capabilities even under ideal conditions (for example twins may look alike to a facial recognition system). Furthermore, pilots and studies have shown that noise could be introduced during acquisition during unfavourable environmental conditions, and this may reduce the effectiveness of a particular biometric (for example under hot and moist conditions the fingerprint acquisition may be problematic due to sweaty fingers). In addition to these advantages of multi-modal fusion, it can deter spoofing, as it is very difficult to spoof two biometric modalities at the same time.

Darrin, you mentioned some of your large scale system deployments currently in place, can you just give us an example of the type of record numbers you are talking about?

Well when you look at say the Republic of Serbia that is sized for over 10 million people as an example. If you look at the welfare recipient system that is in the State of California, it is over 7 million people. These are two examples of our larger scale systems.

Can you provide us with an update on your Printrak Biometric Identification Solution - BIS?

Sure! The update there is that we moved the Printrak BIS into our 9^th generation release, which was in early 2005 it enabled and incorporated us to move to Oracle 10g, which gives us great flexibility in taking advantages of what Oracle has to offer from a data base standpoint. It also moved us from a UNIX only environment from an operating system on the back end servers to a choice of either Linux or HP-UX, which our customer base seems to be very receptive to with more choices of open based OS's. It gives us a lot of flexibility on what we operate on as well from a hardware platform. It also allowed us to have the capability of having either a 1000 ppi solution set across the board as well as 500 ppi, which we have been deploying for years and we can do a mix of 500 and 1000 ppi. And then finally it incorporated a number of enhancements relative to accuracy and automation in the overall work flow.

Some countries are now actually asking for 1000 ppi, I think Sweden was mentioned as one.

Yes, Sweden was the first countrywide 1000 ppi system that has been deployed and we are pleased as that is obviously our customer site. The new advanced system has 1000 ppi front-end capture devices such as the Motorola Printrak LiveScan and Latent Stations as well as backend storage and matching subsystems. We also deployed end-to-end security and PKI encryption on the Sweden system with SmartCard two-factor authentication of users.

You recently launched your mobile AFIS, which combines many of Motorola's core strengths, radio communications, mobile applications and AFIS. What are the advantages and the cost savings associated with this product?

Well the advantage is ubiquitous access to the back end server systems so customers don't have to be concerned with finding a computer that is tethered to the back end server, you can simply access the server via a wireless network or access information that could be locally stored on the client device. Your readers understand the benefits of having wirelessly enabled applications that give people the flexibility of access to the application no matter where they are, within a controlled environment. So without a doubt mobile AFIS gives the ability to really bring the application to the remote user in the field, without that person having to be concerned with being tethered to some type of terminal or computer that is linked to the server. When you look at law enforcement officers, there is a strong benefit from an efficiency and productivity perspective. The officers don't have to transport a suspect, for example, back to a police precinct to identify the suspect. They can perform an identification right there on the spot and they get a positive identification.

And is that case well understood in the law enforcement environment?

It is being more understood as time goes by because this is definitely kind of a new thing we are bringing out into the market. For a number of years we have actually provided mobile data applications into the public safety marketplace and we look at mobile AFIS as an additional module or application that we bring out to the field. The primary applications that the officers have been using and we have been deploying, again for years, have been computer aided dispatch, records management, and queries into state and local data bases. So this is simply again wirelessly enabling additional applications. The final thing relative to mobile AFIS is, if you look at it from a border control standpoint, you can use mobile AFIS to support border control spot checks. To be able to have a border control guard have the access to some type of wireless unit is a great security and safety enhancement that helps to protect a country's borders efficiently.

I know that Motorola takes a leadership role in many different areas including standards. In our recent Year In Review, “standards” was highlighted as one of the very important areas that was seeing good growth in 2005, but it was also recognized as one of the areas that still needed a lot of work for 2006. Can you comment on that?

In the area of standards there has been a move by agencies that want to have biometrics deployed onto small memory sized footprints -- smart chips -- to move from image based matching and operability to a minutia based template base interoperability. To date, although that hasn't been proven in interoperability tests there was a recent announcement by NIST to use minutia on the new Federal ID cards for the PIV ID (Personal Identity Verification) cards, and Motorola is positioned to successfully support our customer base whether they want to use image or minutia based interoperability. It is interesting to note though that ICAO, which is the 188- member country association responsible for interoperability for e-passports, has chosen image based interoperability over minutia, primarily because of the concern that minutia based interoperability has not yet been proven in wide scale deployments.

With two conflicting viewpoints, will this create problem areas down the road?

One problem that is already brewing is that the International standards bodies -- there are two different groups -- there is the INCITS M1 group, which is predominately US based, and then there is the International ISO SC 37 base working group, and those two groups, although there are a lot of common members, actually came up with dissimilar specifications for finger, for face, and for minutia templates. So there are some incompatibilities between the ISO formats and the M1 formats and Motorola is participating in the standards bodies and promoting within both ANSI and ISO mechanisms to get everyone back on track to a common standard. Motorola has carried out a thorough analysis and published an addendum document addressing all the differences between the two standards, and is a key member of the working group tasked with harmonizing of the M1 minutiae template with the SC37 ISO counterpart, and we are thus very familiar with the exact differences in the two formats. Using Motorola's intimate knowledge of all of the standards and their differences, Motorola's Data Exchange Server (DES) has been updated to provide flexible transformation services to handle and translate between all the various data exchange formats including NIST, M1-image, M1-minutia, SC37-image, SC37-minutia, EFTS, CBEFF and others. Furthermore our Advanced Matching Controller (AMC) has been updated to provide fast and highly accurate 1:1 and 1:N matching of the various formats.

Thank you very much for filling us in on that. In summary, is there anything else you would like to add in about Motorola and 2006?

Motorola looks forward to a lot of opportunities to implement the number of orders that we received in 2005, which of course is exciting for us. Additionally we plan on doing a lot of expansion as we go into 2006. It is a highly competitive marketplace as the competition has obviously heated up but we are looking at leveraging our existing customer base as well as growing it in the weeks, months and years to come!

Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today Darrin.

Always my pleasure Peter.

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