Just wanted to share these three new owl mugs we got.
One is orange, one is brown, and one is light blue.
The eyes are adorable on these cups.
It’s almost like a family the way they look together.
All the other coffee/tea cups we have are now officially obsolete.
These are the only ones getting any thirsty attention. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Eighty of these are currently in use at all air, land, and sea borders in Qatar. Further, Dubai International Airport has been piloting this at a terminal that handles 40 million people per year, and it has cut immigration waiting times from 49 minutes to 22 seconds.
This technology has obvious important applications for military, law enforcement, and homeland security, as well as even more generalized security use in the private sector.
And while very impressive, here are some concerns about it that should be addressed:
1) Enrollment of Biometrics and Personal Identification–registering for the system may only take a few seconds for the actual scan, but then verifying who you are (i.e. who those biometrics really belong to) is another step in the process not shown. How do we know that those iris and face prints belong to Joe Schmo the average citizen who should be allowed through the eGate and not to a known terrorist on the watch list? The biometrics need to be associated with a name, address, social security, date of birth and other personal information.
2) Rights versus Recognitions–rights to access and recognition are two different things. Just because there is iris and facial recognition, doesn’t mean that this is someone who should be given access rights to a place, system or organization. So the devil is in the details of implementation in specifying who should have access and who should not.
3) Faking Out The System–no system is perfect and when something is advertised as accurate, the question to me is how accurate and where are the system vulnerabilities. For example, can the system be hacked and false biometrics or personal identification information changed? Can a terrorist cell, criminal syndicate, or nations state create really good fake iris and facial masks for impersonating an enrollee and fooling the system into thinking that a bad good is really a good guy.
4) Privacy of Personally Identifiable Information (PII)–not specific to AOptix, but to this biometric solutions overall–how do we ensure privacy of the data, so it is not stolen or misused such as for identity theft. I understand that AOptix has PKI encryption, but how strong is the encryption,who long does it take to break, and what are the policies and procedures within organizations to safeguard this privacy data.
5) Big Brother Society–biometrics recognition may provide for opportunities for safe and secure access and transit, but what are the larger implications for this to become a “big brother” society where people are identified and tracked wherever they go and whatever they do. Where are the safeguards for democracy and human rights.
Even with these said, I believe that this is the wave of the future for access control–as AOptix’s says, for changing choke points to checkpoints–we need a simple, fast, secure, and cost-effective way to identify friends and foe and this is it, for the masses, in the near-term.
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eHarmony and Match.com and other matchmaking sites are all the rage on the single scene with recommended partners for people being done by computer algorithm.
Now this concept of matching of people is going beyond people’s love lives and into the world of business.
CIO Magazine (1 Nov. 2010) reports in an article called “Call Center Matchmaking: Analytics pair customers with the right agents for better service” that companies are using similar technology to match customers and call centers reps in order to get higher satisfaction ratings and increased retention rates—and it’s working!
Since implementing the IBM system called Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), for example, Assurant has increased customer retention rates by 190 percent.
Other companies have been doing customer matching on a more elementary level for some time—for example, financial service firms route calls from high-net worth or high-balance customers to “premier agents.” Similarly, calls made at certain time are “routed to Boise instead of Bangalore.”
With computer systems like RAMP, there is a recognition that customers can do better by being matched with specific customer service representatives and that we can use business analytics to examine a host of data variables from sex and age to persistence in calling to match a customer to “the right” representative to handle their issues.
Based on success rates, computers have been shown to perform sophisticated business and data analysis, and to successfully match people for more successful business (and life) transactions.
If we can successfully pair people for love and for customer service, it makes me wonder what’s next (maybe happening already)? For example, will we pair people to “the right”:
In essence, as the “bar is raised” in a highly global and competitive environment, will we be pushed to seek to maximize our potential for success interaction with others—for developing high-performance and highly profitable interactions—by pairing exclusively with those that “screen” positive for us?
With genetic testing already being used to screen for babies that people want—like an order at Burger King—“hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us…”—we are already well on our way to “special ordering” the people in our lives.
Companies have also started to use intelligence and personality tests to weed out applicants, and the use of personality tests like Myers Briggs is already being employed for better understanding each other and working together.
However crude all this may be, it is essentially a high-tech way of trying to optimize our performance. The question is can we use technology to enhance personal interactions and elevate performance without subjecting people to undue bias, criticism, and violation of their privacy? This is a very slippery slope indeed.
Another potential problem with computer matching is that when we rely on computers to “tell us” when we have a good match, we are potentially missing potential opportunities for matches with others that cannot be easily quantified or summed up by a computer algorithm? As they say, for some “two birds of a feather flock together” and for others “opposite attract”—we shouldn’t limit ourselves to any creative, positive possibilities in relationships.
andyblumenthal 