Abstract: The rapid advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been greatly changing our society, with clear societal and economic benefits. Cloud, Big Data, Internet of things, services and technologies that are becoming more and more pervasive and conveniently accessible, towards the realization of a ‘smart society’. At the heart of this evolution is the ability to collect, analyze, process, and share an ever-increasing amount of data to extract knowledge for offering personalized and advanced services.

This typically also involves external parties for data management and computation that may be either not authorized to access data or not fully trusted. The complexity of this scenario introduces several security and privacy challenges.

In this talk, I will illustrate some challenges related to guaranteeing confidentiality and integrity of data stored or processed by external providers.

Abstract: Once typically used for critical applications and services, biometric technologies are now pervasively permeating our everyday life enabling seamless and convenient identification, authentication, as well as service assistance, from business to leisure.

Artificial intelligence has been shown effective to extract the relevant knowledge from biometric data in order to increase the performance and deal with less-constrained, unconstrained, and on-the-move acquisition of biometric traits. Besides, modern AI approaches have been developed to distill characteristic information without a priori knowledge of the specific features which are relevant to perform identification and authentication. This allows for expanding the spectrum of applications in daily life, also in difficult environmental conditions. Besides, learning from data allows for higher flexibility and accuracy through operation adaptation.

This lecture will illustrate the main biometrics techniques and the use of artificial intelligence, their strengths, limitations, and applications. Challenges and research directions will also be discussed. Being aware of capabilities and possible threats of biometrics is essential to create biometric-based applications with an ethic-by-design approach which protects the citizens’ privacy and empower them to own their personal data, including their biometric traits.