Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - iBorderCtrl (Intelligent Portable Border Control System)

Teaser

The main objective of iBorderCtrl is to provide a unified solution with aim to speed up the border crossing and at the same time enhance the security and confidence regarding border control checks by bringing together many state of the art technologies ranging from biometric...

Summary

The main objective of iBorderCtrl is to provide a unified solution with aim to speed up the border crossing and at the same time enhance the security and confidence regarding border control checks by bringing together many state of the art technologies ranging from biometric verification, automated deception detection, document authentication and risk assessment. iBorderCtrl designs and implements a comprehensive system that adopts mobility concepts and consists of a two-stage-procedure, designed to reduce cost and time spent per traveller at the land border crossing points: road, walkway, train stations.
To this respect, the specific objectives are to a) significantly increase the efficiency and security in terms of traveller throughput and fewer illegal crossings; b) reduce time at the border by utilising traveller devices and portable units; c) introduce a pre-registration step to better inform travellers of their rights, the travel procedures, data collected as per EU and national legal requirements; d) increase scalability, reduce workload and subjective errors by human agents; e) increase the objective control with automated means that are non-invasive and time consuming; f) create a fifth tier for the four-tier access control model of the Integrated Border Management System involving bona fide and regular travellers.

Work performed

During the first 18 months of the project the following achievements can be reported:
•Address the ethics of profiling and the risk of stigmatization of individuals and groups and link to the possibility of false positives, identify an appropriate mitigation plan.
•Description of the legal framework, an overview of the existing various legislation aspects and preparation of all necessary contractual agreements (i.e. Data Privacy Policy, letter of informed consent).
•Analysis of the user requirements and their translation into functional and technical requirements, description of the general system constraints (data security and privacy), analysis of the different use cases for the system, design of the general iBorderCtrl reference architecture.
•First prototypes of the following components are ready:
oAutomatic Deception Detection System (ADDS) including an interview by a virtual border agent,
othe Face Matching Tool (FMT),
othe Biometric Module (BIO) including fingerprints and palm vein identification
othe Document Authenticity Analytics Tool (DAAT)
oThe risk based assessment tool (RBAT) and the integrated automated border control analytics tool
oThe External Legacy and Social Interfaces (ELSI)
oThe central data repository to collect the data into a single environment
oThe BCAT tool for meta analyses of data to enable a computationally intelligent adaptive border control
oThe user interfaces for the border control agent, the border control manager and the traveller.
oPortable Unit
•Development of a detailed roadmap for continuous integration of the developed components. Various initial integration tests between components have already started, in order to be able to issue, report and tackle bugs early enough and identify problems.
•Plan a specific methodology for executing the experimental evaluation in order to capture the end-user feedback in a unified and consistent manner in the deployment sites as well as the recruitment methodology for volunteers.
•Communication and awareness raising activities have been promoting the project and its results in web, social and physical means, which can be found on the project website:
oThe project logo, flyer, poster, general presentation, website and social networking sites on LinkedIn and Twitter, all of which are continuously updated with progress and achievements. Indicative of the achievement in awareness raising and dissemination is the statistic of the visits of the website, which at the end of M18, has reached the total of 31956 unique visits (outperforming the KPI set initially at 500 visitors per year)
oProject presence in partners’ websites.
oEight scientific publications
oParticipation to events at national and European level (at least 10 presentations or posters in conferences, events and workshops)
oOrganisation of two workshops
oOrganisation of one special session in an IEEE conference
oPress article
•Identification of target markets and customers, overview of existing business models, potential routes to market and relevant penetration channels, exploitable results both as a whole service and as discrete exploitable outcomes.
Timely and appropriate trouble-shooting, immediate reaction to problems and misunderstandings and adequate use of all project resources by the project and technical management.

Final results

iBorderCtrl key aspects are the utilization of novel and existing technologies by providing a wearable platform that empowers -through technology- the border guard and a centralized advanced analytics platform that controls the secure collection, flow and analyses of data that helps both increase the accuracy at the individual crossing level as well as prediction of events and resource utilization. More specifically:
• Pre-Registration Phase: Travelers self-report at the comfort of their own home through an on-line system that collects all relevant data helping them ensure they are fulfilling their obligations and allowing for all automated checks to take place in advance, allowing for much more computationally expensive methods to be deployed.
• Border Crossing Phase: iBorderCtrl provides key technology to the border guards both integrated to existing static installations, as well as a portable hardware platform.
• During both phases, RBAT will take advantage of the different steps/checks outcomes and also consume any datasets being available, to finally classify travelers in terms of risk, thus supporting the decision-making of the border guard.
• BCAT’s advanced post-hoc analytics will help identify new patterns and knowledge allowing the iBorderCtrl system to adapt quickly to new situations and at the same time evaluate each module’s performance.
• Speed up the crossing for valid travellers while highlighting all travellers that must be further checked by agents and exactly the cause they were highlighted (document authentication, potential attempt at deception etc.). By allowing agents to know in advance how many, specifically which and at what time their crossing is expected they can plan ahead to spend the necessary time for each traveller without slowing the average border crossing time for valid crossings. Furthermore, time savings are achieved by guiding travellers to have with them all necessary documentation and analysing those documents in advance.
• Beyond biometrics: iBorderCtrl deploys well established as well as novel technologies together to collect data that will move beyond biometrics and onto biomarkers of deceit in the ADDS tool (coupled with an avatar) that quantifies the probability of deceit in interviews by analysing interviewees non-verbal micro expressions.
It should be mentioned that iBorderCtrl already implements many of the features planned to be included in the Entry/ Exit (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation (ETIAS) Systems both proposed by the European Commission to enhance the border control check procedures. In addition, iBorderCtrl solution paves the way towards the interoperability of EU systems for security, border and migration management as envisaged by the EC.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.iborderctrl.eu/.