January, 2008 - Monthly Update
Hello again from the IAI office.
Mid-Year Board of Director’s Meeting
The IAI’s Board of Directors
The IAI’s Board of Directors will hold its mid-year meeting in Orlando on January 24th and 25th. If anyone has matters to be brought before the board, please contact the Board Chair, Diana Castro, at diana.castro@theiai.org
2008 IAI Membership Directory
The 2008 Membership Directory is being printed. It should be in the mail to each of you in the next ten days or so.
Identification News
The first issue of Identification News will be sent to all members around February 1, 2008. This new publication of the IAI will be published six times each year in the “off” months from the JFI. All IAI members will now receive a mailing from the association each month.
2008 IAI Annual International Educational Conference
It’s not too early to begin thinking about this summer’s conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The dates are Sunday, August 17th through Friday evening, August 22nd. Please visit the conference page of the IAI’s website (http://www.theiai.org/conference/2008/index.php) for complete conference and hotel information. I would encourage anyone who plans to attend to make hotel reservations early as the room blocks often fill up as the conference draws near. Educational Program Coordinator Jim Gettemy notes that he has received over 120 workshop submissions and applications to present workshops are now closed. He is still in need of lecture submissions however so anyone interested in presenting a lecture at the Louisville Conference is encouraged to submit an abstract to him using the submission form found on the IAI’s website at:
http://www.theiai.org/conference/presentations/callforpapers.php
Recent conferences have been absolutely outstanding and this one promises to continue that tradition of excellence.
CFSO News - Federal Funding for Forensics
President Bush signed into law a consolidated appropriations bill with the following forensic funding:
- $147,391,000 for a DNA analysis and capacity enhancement program including the purposes of section 2 of the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000,
- $18,800,000 is for Paul Coverdell Forensic Sciences Improvement Grants.
Congratulations all around but especially to Beth Lavach, the CFSO lobbyist, who works very had on behalf of the forensics community to make these kinds of appropriations happen.
Forensic Science Communications – FBI
The January 2008 issue of Forensic Science Communications has been posted to the FBI’s Internet site at http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/current/index.htm.
If you have trouble accessing the issue via the link, go to the FBI’s home page and access “Reports & Publications” on the left-hand side. Forensic Science Communications is listed under law enforcement services.
NIST Mobile ID Workshop
The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has convened a series of Mobile ID Workshops to deal with standards for mobile ID devices. These devices allow fingerprints to be taken in the field, transmitted to an AFIS site, and return to the requester a criminal history record, a warrant check result or other fingerprint based notification.
At the present time however, there are no standards in place for those devices. A device that will work with one vendor’s AFIS system in state “A” will not work with another vendor’s AFIS system in state “B”. This is becoming problematic as agencies continue to purchase these devices and expand their use. For example, let’s say Milwaukee, Wisconsin issues these devices to their officers allowing them to take one or two prints of an individual, transmit them to the Wisconsin AFIS system and get a positive or negative response. They cannot however query AFIS in Minnesota or Illinois due to the lack of interoperability of both the handheld device and the AFIS system itself. These devices may have limited access to IAFIS but there is much more data available in state and local AFIS systems, especially relative to minor offenses, than there is at the federal level. This is another consequence of the lack of interoperability of AFIS of different manufacture and will be compounded with hand-held devices.
Peter Komarinski, Chair of the IAI’s AFIS Committee, is the IAI’s official representative to this committee. There have been two meetings and more are scheduled. Below is Peter’s synopsis of the last meeting and a brief outline of what is scheduled for the next:
The second in a series of Mobile ID Workshops was held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD on Nov 29th. The 50+ attendees represented the interests of local, state and federal governments, vendors, consultants and the IAI.
At issue is the strategy to develop protocols for the use of mobile communication devices that would transmit and receive biometric information from any one of several jurisdictions. An example might be for a police officer, in stopping a car, to capture and transmit face and finger image information to the primary identification system, perhaps the local AFIS system. If no identification or “hit” was made, the inquiry would go to another AFIS system, either to a politically adjacent AFIS, the state AFIS or IAFIS.
This process would tap into the databases of different systems developed by different agencies, built by different vendors with varying levels of biometric information. This level of information interchange, or interoperability, does not currently exist between all local and state AFIS systems.
The focus of this second meeting was to define best practices for data quality and format interoperability for mobile biometric capture devices.
Best practices include communication and security specifications as well.
The capture requirements for the mobile ID devices focus many of the same issues as other image devices. However, there may be a wide range of such devices based on the needs of the local jurisdiction. There was agreement that, at a minimum, each device would include:
- Capability to capture a Flat Image
- Image Resolution at 500 ppi
- Levels of Gray at 256
- Minimum Image size
- Minimum Image area
- Max number of fingers per image e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4?
- Certification of Sensor with either PIV requirements or Appendix F
- Certification of Minutiae Extractor with PIV requirements or NA
The next meeting will discuss compression and packet format as well various applications. These applications include:
- Minimum number of fingers for verification, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4?
- Minimum number of fingers for Identification, e.g. 2, 4, 6, 8?
- Minimum number of fingers for enrollment, e.g. 2, 4, 6, 8?
- Should NIST FP Quality (NFIQ) be mandatory or optional?
- Which Finger(s) should be captured?
The third meeting will be scheduled in late February or early March, 2008.
Joe Polski
