Biometric Technologies, Wildlife Conservation and Your Business

Part of the Wired (UK) series: 25 big ideas for 2012: Connected conservation

Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich have developed a system that can rapidly process images of great apes in order to recognise them more quickly in the wild. The program isolates individual faces and captures their biometric data.

and

As Fraunhofer researcher Alexander Loos says: "These new technologies mean that human resources can be allocated to more complex tasks than filling out checklists."

This short chapter in the larger Wired series touches upon two key aspects of the biometrics value proposition: ID management and Increased Productivity.

Facial recognition can help transform a task that humans find difficult into a task that we're actually quite good at [see: (Facial Recognition vs Human) & (Facial Recognition + Human)].

In this primate case, facial recognition likely helps researchers become familiar with individuals more quickly and prevents some misidentifications from occurring.

The last quote above is a perfect illustration of the productivity gains that biometric systems can help deliver. Many highly skilled people spend a lot of their time doing identity management tasks that they don't find particularly interesting and that can be done more quickly and effectively with the assistance of better technology. Examples include teachers taking classroom attendance and retail managers shuffling time cards.

If primate researchers in the middle of a jungle have improved their accuracy and efficiency using better identity management technology, your business probably can, too.

Why You Are Very Special

The biology of uniqueness (Real Clear Science)

This neat little blog post at Real Clear Science covers some biological facts of human uniqueness and points out that social animals maintain physiological uniqueness even among very large populations.

And don't worry: though the world is growing more crowded, you will remain exceptional. UCLA researchers have found that in social species like ours, the larger the group, the more distinct its members. By focusing on alarm call vocalizations in eight species of social rodents, biologists Kimberly Pollard and Daniel Blumstein discovered that larger group sizes were strongly correlated to increased uniqueness. This made it easier to differentiate between individuals. According to Pollard:

Nature has solved the "Where's Waldo" problem by endowing highly social creatures with more unique features, which helps them find their pals in the crowd.