2024 FedID Award Winners
BEST TECHNICAL ADVANCEMENT
1) Finalist: The Biometric Interoperability and Compliance Office Team
Over the past year the Defense Forensics and Biometric Agency’s BISCO team has worked diligently and tirelessly to establish the Department of Defense’s sole Biometric Conformance Testing Capability. The team worked closely with operational partners and the DoD Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) to verify its test procedures, reports, and tools so that the biometric collection devices undergoing evaluation can be provided a memorandum validating conformance to the standard and be added to the DFBA Conformance Products List (CPL). This initiative underscores DFBA’s commitment to providing assurance to program stakeholders that their equipment meets the stringent specifications set forth. With DFBA's rigorous testing regimen and JITC's expertise, programs can now move forward with confidence in the interoperability and reliability of their biometric collection devices.
This mandate stems from comprehensive DoD policy and guidance, underpinned by the overarching requirement outlined in United States Code, Title 10 – Armed Forces. This policy requires the Secretary of Defense and the DoD Chief Information Officer ensure that business systems, information technology, and national security systems are interoperable. This responsibility is in alignment with the recently published DoD Instruction 8310.01 Information Technology Standards in the DoD. It is within this realm of imperative coordination that the BISCO emerges, poised to support, and facilitate DoD program's compliance.
The Department of Defense (DoD) Biometric Standards and Compliance Office (BISCO) Team consists of Ryan Triplett – Government Lead and Contract Support Staff: Brian Harrig, Michelle Davis, Steve Battjer
2) Finalist: DHS OBIM-Mobile Collaborative Team
In collaboration with DHS Science and Technology, OBIM developed OBIM-mobile, the adaptation of a DoD mobile device, to provide a field portable finger, face, and iris collection device to support IXM service requests and provides Components and Stakeholders a standardized piece of collection equipment that is field-ready for various mission environments and provides proven collection capabilities. OBIM-Mobile consists of two inherent parts:
1) Standardized Mobile device User Interface to collect biometrics and then submit IDENT/HART verify or identify requests (in DoD EBTS format) 2) Middleware that translates the EBTS to an IXM request for IDENT/HART biometric services
The interface can be implemented directly on a mobile collection device or connected through a cloud-based Representational State Transfer (REST) web service. The ability to use this middleware allows EBTS collection to be easily and efficiently translated to IXM so that images can be ingested and searchable in IDENT/HART.
The OBIM-Mobile platform provides the ability for a mobile device to transmit collected biometric and biographic information to OBIM and receive a real-time verify or identify match/no-match response. OBIM-Mobile’s user-friendly platform, training videos, and mobile phone application interface makes the collection process much easier for DHS Officers and improves the quality of the collected biometric data. OBIM adapted OBIM-Mobile from a DoD mobile device to provide a field portable collection device to support IXM capability, OBIM-Mobile has effectively broken the barrier to utilizing market-ready DoD compliant biometric capture devices connected to a mobile platform to submit IXM requests to the OBIM enterprise services.
One of the keys to national security is the ability to process people quickly and positively. Inconsistent biometric gathering and ingest impedes the rapid processing of finger, face and iris for Component and Stakeholder mission requirements. The OBIM-Mobile project is aligned with DHS and OBIM strategic goals, and DHS’ Integrated Planning Guidance related to better analyzing and sharing of information by helping to create uniformity of collection devices and improve data that is collected and shared between agencies. In coordination with Stakeholders, innovative benefits can be realized for natural disaster on-scene processing centers, federal law enforcement management and decision activities, and border and vetting enforcements nationally and internationally.
The team consisted of: Will Graves, Caitlin Kneapler, Kevin Grottle AND Team: Scott Shockey, Alicia Harrison, Brian Pittack, Chad Schulenberg, Sarita Rijwani, John Clemmensen (DHS S&T) AND Contractors: Tom Freed Chris Kearns Steve Batteji Alexey Semynovo Ashok Kumar
BEST OPERATIONAL SUCCESS
1) Finalist: Jason Lim, Identity Management Capability Manager, TSA Requirements and Capability Analysis
Jason Lim serves as TSA's Identity Management Capability Manager (IDM CM). In that role he pioneered the development, testing, and deployment of TSA's PreCheck(r) "Touchless Identity Solution" (TIS). This effort required a unique blend of organizational, technical, and process expertise to be successful.
Jason coordinated with internal TSA offices, major domestic airlines, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), DHS (e.g., CIO and S&T), industry partners, and airport authorities to get the solution deployed to 5 major airport hubs by the end of CY24 (ATL, DTW, JFK, ATL, and ORD) in support of the President's Customer Experience Executive Order and the TSA Biometrics Roadmap.
The TIS solution verifies DHS Trusted Traveler identities at bag drop, security, and boarding without the use of physical ID credentials, significantly stepping up identity assurance for TSA and air carrier front line operations. It does this faster and more accurately than current manual and credential authentication capabilities allow.
As TSA scales this solution to additional locations in 2024+, TIS will yield enhanced security, operational efficiencies, and customer experience for a significant percentage of air travelers per day and offer a truly differentiated curb-to-gate experience for DHS Trusted Travelers across the aviation ecosystem.
2) Finalist: Carol Charsky, I-Solutions Lead, Customs and Boarder Protection (CBP), Passenger Systems Program Directorate (PSPD).
Carol Charsky serves as the acting lead for the I-Solutions portfolio, supported by Leidos, within the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Passenger Systems Program Directorate (PSPD). She led the implementation of new technology within her portfolio as outlined in this nomination.
Global travel continues post-pandemic recovery, with many destinations exceeding pre-pandemic volumes for arrivals and receipts. Concurrently, customer experience remains a strategic focus for High-Impact Service Providers like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP’s introduction of Global Entry (GE) NextGen Portals and the GE Mobile application, both incorporating facial recognition technology (FRT), are demonstrating great operational success – providing trusted travelers with rapid, touchless, cleared entry into the U.S.
To enable touchless trusted traveler identification via FRT, CBP creates photographic galleries (by airport and terminal) using Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) manifests for incoming flights during a brief, defined time period. CBP systems populate these localized galleries with photographs, and then GE interfaces with the Traveler Verification Service (TVS) that compiles pre-existing photographs maintained in the Automated Targeting System (ATS) Unified Passenger (UPAX) module. CBP acquires these images from U.S. passports or visas, previous entries, and/or other DHS encounters, including GE enrollment photos. TVS then generates a biometric template for each gallery photograph and stores the template, but not the actual photograph, in the TVS-cloud for matching when the traveler arrives at the GE NextGen portal. The GE system verifies traveler identity, and with other information, verifies the traveler’s eligibility for entry or referral to secondary inspection. The GE system notifies an officer when a traveler at a GE NextGen Portal is not cleared for entry. To date, 279 GE NextGen Portals replaced more than 800 legacy kiosks throughout U.S. airports and overseas Pre-Clearance locations.
As a result, the GE NextGen Portal’s biometric identification using FRT comparison enables trusted travelers to clear customs without a physical touchpoint in as short as 5 to 10 minutes. In addition to this expediting processing and leveraging mobile technology, the GE NextGen Portals eliminated paper receipt printing, further protecting the privacy of travelers and reducing CBP’s environmental footprint and associated expenditures.
Next, the GE Mobile application, in use at 10 CBP Ports of Entry, enables travelers to take a “selfie” photograph for FRT matching and bypass the GE portals altogether. Using the free, secure GE Mobile application on smartphones or other mobile devices, trusted travelers submit their travel document and selfie photograph to CBP for immediate, efficient processing. As a result, passport control inspection, congestion in the customs area, and overall wait time is reduced.
Together, GE NextGen Portals and GE Mobile use FRT to enable safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable travel, encouraging more travel for the future. They are innovations benefitting the overarching GE program, which serves more than 12 million members.
3) Finalist: Oak Ridge National Laboratory BRIAR T&E Team
Over the past 4 years, the Testing and Evaluation team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been working tirelessly around-the-clock to build the most complex, richest, feature complete multi-modal biometric recognition dataset in the world. This effort has been to support the Biometric Recognition and Identification at Altitude and Range (BRIAR), an IARPA program that has been an instrumental mover in the biometrics research complex, enabling the USA to maintain its edge in emerging long-range biometric capabilities.
When the BRIAR program was conceived, no publicly or commercially available datasets or algorithms existed in the research space to support what the program needed to accomplish: The development and evaluation of algorithms that could seamlessly fuse facial, whole-body, and gait biometrics to perform accurate biometric matching at vast distances and under adverse atmospheric conditions. For that reason, in early 2020 the BRIAR T&E team at ORNL conceived and commenced a massive-scale operation to collect the most comprehensive biometric research dataset in the world. The team, consisting of biometric researchers, engineers, pilots, and proctors, all came together to with the goal of operational excellence. The datasets collected have involved over 90 camera platforms, research vision systems, unmanned arial vehicles, and supporting hardware such as scintillometers, time synchronizers, mobile servers, generators, and mesh networks. To date, this collection has taken place in 5 cities across the country, aimed and ensuring a diverse representation of the country’s population.
The effort to coordinate and orchestrate this production is unparalleled and has taken years to hone. As this effort began at the height of the pandemic in 2020, the ORNL BRIAR T&E team had to work overtime designing facilities and protocols that met stringent human safety requirements. Yet even in the face of the pandemic, the team achieved outstanding results by hitting and surpassing collection goals for human volunteers. In the years following, the team has optimized the deployment and operation of this collection effort, enabling the team to be highly mobile, and performing full dataset collections in 5 cities (and counting) across the country.
After all that data had been collected, the job turned to the data-side of the T&E team, who’s herculean task has been to sift through, curate, and annotate hundreds of terabytes of video as quickly as possible, to ensure that data for development and testing is released to research teams as quickly as possible. To keep data secure, the ORNL team pioneered a secure HPC infrastructure never-before used for biometrics that has set a precedence for PII security and enabled the team to quickly develop and iterate on data annotation and algorithm evaluation approaches confidently, all while minimizing concern of data leakage or breach.
It has required a large team from a myriad of different scientific backgrounds to come together under one collaborative umbrella to make ORNL BRIAR T&E team the success that it has been and continues to be, in pushing the boundaries of cutting-edge biometric technology. Recognizing the size of the team and the contributions of all team members, the nominees would like to recognize these specific individuals who have made highly impactful contributions over the course of the entire program: David Cornett (Principal Investigator), David Bolme (Co-Principal Investigator), Deniz Aykac (Data Curation and Evaluation team member), Joel Brogan (Evaluation team lead), Nick Burchfield (Communications team lead), Scott Dolvin (Project Manager), Andrew Duncan (UAV team member), Jairus Hines (UAV team lead), Gavin Jager (Sensors and Data Curation team member), Christi Johnson (Sensors team lead), Bart Murphy (Human Subjects Testing and Sensors team member), Leanne Thompson (Human Subjects Testing team lead), and Bob Zhang (Data Curation team lead).
BEST EDUCATIONAL EFFORT
1) Finalist: Lora Sims, Director, Face Center of Excellence (FaCE)
Lora Sims is the Director of the Face Center of Excellence (FaCE) and has been supporting standards development through membership and leadership in various working groups including Facial Identification Scientific Working Group (FISWG) and Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) for Forensic Science and is a member of the International Association for Identification (IAI).
Ms. Sims was instrumental in developing the first facial examination training-to-competency program for the Department of Defense Biometric Operations Directorate. With the growing use of and interest in Facial Recognition Systems (FRS), it is essential for users to be trained in the proper application of the technology to mitigate some of the negative perceptions about FRS. She established a standards-based training program to reach the broader Facial Identification community as a resource for local, state, federal, international, and corporate entities that are involved in the comparison of facial images as a biometric discipline. The training program that Ms. Sims created has expanded into additional courses of instruction: general information on Facial Identification, mid-level courses that introduce practitioners to best practices, refresher courses for continuing education, and expert-level courses. Ms. Sims’ development and continued improvement of the expansive Facial Identification training program is respected across the country and around the world.
2) Finalist: IDManagement.gov
GSA's Identity Assurance and Trusted Access Division within the Office of Technology Policy led a revolutionary transformation of the idmanagement.gov website. The team consolidated and streamlined five websites into a single comprehensive, user-friendly, platform for all ICAM related information. This remarkable achievement significantly fostered identity education and collaboration across government and private sectors. The idmanagement.gov website features an array of topics such as how to buy ICAM products and services, how to manage operations, and programmatic and technical guides on single sign-on, PIV, PIV-I, phishing-resistant authenticators and more. The team's strategic approach to the governmentwide challenge turned idmanagement.gov into an open dynamic ICAM knowledge repository for the community.