Thursday, April 12, 2012

Biometrics and the Rise of Virtual Crime

Depending upon how much time you spend in a virtual world, this one could blow your mind a little bit..

He had massive purple dreadlocks, green lips and was dressed like Michael Jackson (Chem.Info)
Virtual crimes will become more common as we venture more and more into these worlds, says computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy. To prevent this, multinational defence firm Raytheon, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has a patent pending on fusing a person's real biometrics with their 3D avatar, so you know for sure who you are speaking to in a digital world.

Yampolskiy and colleagues at the Cyber-Security Lab at the University of Louisville in Kentucky are going one step further: they are developing the field of artificial biometrics, or "artimetrics". Similar to human biometrics, artimetrics would serve to authenticate and identify non-biological agents such as avatars, physical robots or even chatbots (see "Spot the bad bot").


h/t @HodgeBarrry