BEAT, the Biometric Evaluation and Testing project, is now an open-source platform available for download.
The project is funded by the European Commission, and its mandate is to build a standards framework for assessing biometric technologies. The project has also sought to ensure that these standards can be used both by the academic community and the private sector, and a major component of that effort is the development of a digital, open source platform.
Thus, BEAT’s newly announced digital platform is a considerable success for the project. It totals about 80,000 lines of code, and builds on other open source platforms to enable a web app for users.
While BEAT most explicitly aims to help develop a European Identification Certification System, it arrives at a time when biometric identification technology is proliferating throughout Europe and the rest of the world, and has the potential to significantly contribute to discussions among civic groups, business networks, and public policy planners. Indeed, with officials negotiating over authentication standards in banking and privacy rules connected to data transfers between the EU and the US, BEAT could prove to be a very useful tool in the discourse.
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March 7, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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