Panel: The Future of Biometrics

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.

Jon Callas is a technologist, inventor, and executive with deep experience in designing products and systems. Called "An entrepreneur and innovator in information security and cryptography, operating system security, public key infrastructure, and intellectual property rights," he is also an expert in privacy and an innovator in human-computer interactions. Mr. Callas is a creator of several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP. He founded several companies including PGP and Blackphone, is a creator of Apple's FileVault 2 storage encryption system, and led their application security red team on projects including FaceID. He has worked on public policy and human rights at the ACLU and EFF.

Adam Czajka is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His research focuses on computer vision, biometrics and security, with a special interest in methods increasing reliability of iris recognition in adverse scenarios such as presentation attacks, impact of eye diseases on iris identification and applications of iris technology in forensics. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award. Dr Czajka’s research has been funded by the US Department of Defense, US Army, US National Institute of Justice, FBI Biometric Center of Excellence, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), US National Science Foundation, European Commission, Polish Ministry of Higher Education, and numerous companies. Full CV: https://adamczajka.com/

Prof Sébastien Marcel (IEEE and IAPR Fellow) is a senior researcher at the Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland), he heads the Biometrics Security and Privacy group and conducts research on face recognition, speaker recognition, vein recognition, attack detection (presentation attacks, morphing attacks, deepfakes) and template protection. He is also Professor at the University de Lausanne (UNIL) at the School of Criminal Justice. He received his Ph.D. degree in signal processing from Université de Rennes I in France (2000) at CNET, the research center of France Telecom (now Orange Labs). He is also the Director of the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing, which conducts certifications of biometric products. He was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biometrics and Identity Science, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, a Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security Special Issue on “Biometric Spoofing and Countermeasures”, and Co-editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Special Issue on “Biometric Security and Privacy”. He is also the lead Editor of the Springer Handbook of Biometrics Anti-Spoofing (Editions 1, 2 and 3).

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”. 

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.