Center for Unified Biometrics and Sciences

1. CUBS
About the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors
VenuGovindaraju
Distinguished Professor, SUNY Buffalo
CUBS Director

2. About CUBS
• Advancing biometric technologies for civilian and
homeland security by integrating pattern recognition
and machine learning algorithms with sensors
technology since 2003
• Two strategic application areas:
Biometrics and Language Technologies
• Funded by industry and government agencies
• Scholarly activities include 25 PhD dissertations and
350 scientific papers

3. Major Technical Achievements
• Postal: Developed handwriting recognition technology used by US
Postal Service leading to savings of several hundred million dollars
“Computing Research that Changed the World: Reflections and
Perspectives” March 25, 2009”:: Impact ::
• Web Security: Innovated the first handwritten CAPTCHAs to improve
web security “MIT” Tech Review January 09, 2009
• Privacy Preserving Biometrics: Innovated a hashing method for storing
and matching fingerprint data for cancelable biometrics US Patent 2011
• Multilingual OCR: Steered the OCR community research towards
including Indic scripts in digital library initiatives Guide to OCR for Indic
Scripts
• Deceit Detection: Developed automated techniques for analyzing eye
movements and facial expressions. Can machines tell when a person is
lying?

4. People

5. Projects
Language Technologies Biometrics
Multilingual OCR (Arabic, Indic, and CJK Modalities
scripts (Face, fingerprint, gait, iris, signature)
Historical Documents Cancelable Biometrics (private
(restoration, transcription, indexing) templates, cryptography)
PDA Interfaces (online recognition, gestures) People Tracking (smart environments)
White Board Technologies (video, distance Gaze Tracking (assisted living, marketing)
learning)
Facial Expression Analysis ( deceit
Editorial Gesture Recognition (collaborative detection, impaired driving)
document editing)
Emotion Analysis (fMRI)
Medical Informatics (forms, prescriptions, lab
reports) Scene Understanding (locating people in
crowds)
Web Security (CAPTCHAs)
Fusion (modalities, classifiers)
Search Engines (handwriting, multilingual)

6. CUBS Facts
Where are they now?
CUBS students have been employed by top tier companies such as Amazon, BBN, eBay, Fujitsu,
Google, IBM, L1, Siemens, and Yahoo Research
Computing Research that Changed the World
“… VenuGovindaraju and colleagues developed a learning based system which processes 25
billion letters a year automatically… saving hundreds of millions of dollars for the United States
Postal Service.” (Presentation at Library of Congress)
Research and Development
R&D investment of over $50M in pattern recognition technologies
cubs.buffalo.edu
govind@buffalo.edu