Speakers

Arun Ross is the Martin J. Vanderploeg Endowed Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, and the Site Director of NSF’s Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR). He received the B.E. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science from BITS Pilani, India, and the M.S. and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Michigan State University. He was in the faculty of West Virginia University between 2003 and 2012 where he received the Benedum Distinguished Scholar Award for excellence in creative research and the WVU Foundation Outstanding Teaching Award.

Ross is an internationally recognized expert in biometrics, privacy, computer vision and deep learning. He is a recipient of the JK Aggarwal Prize (2014) and the Young Biometrics Investigator Award (2013) from the International Association of Pattern Recognition for his contributions to the field of Pattern Recognition and Biometrics. He was designated a Kavli Fellow by the US National Academy of Sciences by virtue of his presentation at the 2006 Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposia. Ross is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.

Ross has advocated for the responsible use of biometrics in multiple forums including the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Identity and Security in Switzerland in 2018. He testified as an expert panelist in an event organized by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee at the UN Headquarters in 2013. In June 2022, he testified at the US House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on the topic of Biometrics and Personal Privacy. He is a co-author of the monograph “Handbook of Multibiometrics” and the textbook “Introduction to Biometrics”

Christoph Busch is member of the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology (IIK) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. He holds a joint appointment with the computer science faculty at Hochschule Darmstadt (HDA), Germany. Further he lectures Biometric Systems at Technical University of Denmark (DTU) since 2007.

He received his PhD in the field of computer graphics in 1997. In the same year he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (Fraunhofer IGD) as head of the department Security Technology. Prof. Dr. C. Busch has since been responsible for the acquisition, the management and the control of various applied research and development projects.

On behalf of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) he has been the responsible project coordinator for the project series BioIS, BioFace and BioFinger, BioKeyS Pilot-DB, KBEinweg – all projects dealing with biometric applications in general and performance and security testing in detail. In the European research program he was initiator of multiple projects (e.g. 3D-Face, FIDELITY and iMARS). Further he was/is partner in the projects TURBINE, BEST Network, ORIGINS, INGRESS, PIDaaS, SOTAMD, RESPECT, TReSPAsS, EINSTEIN and CarMen. He is also principal investigator in the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE).

Moreover, Christoph Busch was co-founder of the CAST-Forum (www.cast-forum.de) that was established in 1999. Further he is co-founder of the European Association for Biometrics (www.eab.org) that was established in 2011 and assembles in the meantime more than 200 institutional members. In 2020 he founded the Steinbeis Research Center BISE – Biometrics.

Christoph Busch co-authored more than 700 technical papers and has been a speaker at international conferences. He served for various program committees (NIST IBPC, NIST IFPC, IJCB, ICPR, CVPR, IWBF, ICIP, BSI-Congress, EUROGRAPHICS) and served for several conferences, journals and magazines as reviewer (e.g. ACM-SIGGRAPH, ACM-TISSEC, IEEE CG&A, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, on Information Forensics and Security, on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the Elsevier Journal Computers & Security). He is also an appointed member of the editorial board of the IET journal on Biometrics and has served previously for the IEEE TIFS journal.

Since 2002 Christoph Busch is a member of the steering committee of the BIOSIG special interest group on Biometrics within the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).

Furthermore he chairs the biometrics working group of the TeleTrusT association as well as the German standardization body on Biometrics (DIN-NIA37). He is convenor of WG3 in ISO/IEC JTC1 SC37 on Biometrics.

Dr.-Ing. Clemens Seibold is a scientist at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) and Humboldt-University Berlin. He develops trustworthy computer vision systems and biometric fraud detection solutions, with research spanning explainable AI, particularly for deepfake, face morphing, and presentation attack detection, as well as motion and multiple-object tracking, generative AI, and photogrammetry. His morphing detector achieved top rankings in multiple categories of NIST’s FATE MORPH Challenge. Dr. Seibold has coordinated and led industrial projects and sub-projects within several public research initiatives and taught courses at the Humboldt-University Berlin. In 2024, he earned his Dr.-Ing. from Humboldt-University Berlin with a dissertation on robust and explainable face morphing detection and high-quality morph generation.

Christian Rathgeb is a professor with the Faculty of Computer Science, Hochschule Darmstadt (HDA), Germany. He is also a principal investigator with the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE). His research interests include pattern recognition, iris and face recognition, the security aspects of biometric systems, secure process design, and privacy enhancing technologies for biometric systems.

Adi Akavia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa, where she also directs the Biometric Research Subcenter within the Center for Cyber Law & Policy. She earned her PhD from MIT under Shafi Goldwasser and completed postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), DIMACS (Rutgers), and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Her research focuses on cryptography, computational complexity, and privacy-preserving computation. Recent work includes advances in privacy-preserving machine learning and secure search, along with methods to substantially reduce the runtime and storage overheads of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE),and foundational results on achievable CCA-style relaxations for FHE security. She also developed topology-hiding secure computation methods for distributed networks, enabling parties to compute collaboratively without revealing the neither the data nor the structure of the underlying communication graph.

Prof. Akavia has served on the program committees of leading cryptography conferences, including CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, and TCC, and she serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) and Communications in Cryptology (CiC).

Hendrik Graupner is a senior innovation developer at Bundesdruckerei GmbH and a doctoral candidate at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany. After studying medical computer science at Heidelberg University, he transitioned to cybersecurity engineering. He joined the innovation department of Bundesdruckerei in 2016, where his work in the area of security and privacy includes anonymization, pseudonymization, and privacy-aware data synthesis. His scientific focus lies in experimental biometrics, where he is currently investigating how to leverage cognitive processes for authentication and identification tasks. This interdisciplinary research integrates the fields of psychology and cybersecurity.

Naama Ben-Zvi serves as the Biometric Commissioner and the Head of the Identity & Biometric Application Unit, a division within the National Cyber Directorate (INCD) in the Prime Minister's Office of Israel. Naama joined the Prime Minister's Office Legal Department in 2008. Over a decade ago, she played a key role in establishing the Identity & Biometric Application Unit and served as the Unit's legal advisor for seven years. Her responsibilities included overseeing all legal and privacy aspects of the unit's missions in biometric applications across Government, public, and private sectors in Israel.

From 2019 to 2022, Naama held the position of Department Manager of Biometric Projects, and from 2022 to 2023, she served as Director of Oversight & Compliance, responsible for supervising National Biometric projects and establishing policy and guidelines for the Unit. She has held her current position since October 1, 2023.

In addition to her role within the INCD, Naama is also the Gender Equality Officer, tasked with promoting and monitoring equal opportunity and gender sensitivity within the organization. 

Naama earned her LLB degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002 and her LLM degree from Bar-Ilan University in 2018. She has been a member of the Israeli Bar Association since 2003, holds certification as an Information System Analyst from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and is an IEEE certified Biometrics Professional.

In November 2023, Naama joined the Biometrics Institute Director Board, alongside other civil servants from around the world.

Orr Dunkelman is a full professor of computer science at the Computer Science Department at the University of Haifa in Israel, currently on Sabbatical at TU Berlin with the Security in Telecommunications (SecT) chair. He received his Ph.D. from the Technion in 2006, and his research interests include cryptography (with emphasis on cryptanalysis), privacy, computer security, and biometrics. Orr has published more than 100 publications in leading conferences and journals. He served as the program chair of EUROCRYPT 2022 (as well as other venues), and the general chair of EUROCRYPT 2018. He has been a member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) board (2017-2018) and as was a co-director of the Center for Cyber, Law and Policy (CCLP) at the University of Haifa, and the head of the Center for research of biometrics and its applications that operates as part of the CCLP. He is also a co-founder of the "Privacy Israel" NGO.