Schuckers gives talk on assessing equity and fairness in biometrics at BIOSIG 2023

Charles A. Dana Professor of Statistics and Data Science Michael Schuckers gave a talk at the 2023 BIOSIG (https://fg-biosig.gi.de/mitteilung/conference-report-on-ieee-biosig-2023) Conference in Darmstadt, Germany in September.  The talk entitled “Statistical Methods for Testing Equity of False Non Match Rates across Multiple Demographic Groups” discussed statistical methods for comparing whether or not differences between demographic groups, e.g. ethnic groups or age groups in their ability to access a biometrically based device were statistically discernible.  Recently there has been a lot of attention paid to the fairness of facial recognition and other biometric systems. This paper establishes the statistical methods for their rigorous statistical comparison for detecting statistical differences among demographic groups.  This work is supported by the Center for Identification Technology Research (https://citer.clarkson.edu) which is a National Science Foundation Industry University Cooperative Resource Center under Grant 16505023.  The work was joint with students and faculty at Clarkson University.

Professor Schuckers is a leader in the field of biometric authentication, particularly the evaluation of the statistical performance of these devices.  He was a founding member of CITeR, his work has been cited as part of international standards in biometrics and he is the author of the 2010 monograph Computational Methods for Biometric Authentication: Statistical Methods for Performance Evaluation.  Schuckers is also a prominent figure in sports analytics particularly ice hockey analytics.  A Fulbright Scholar at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2013, his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense.