Biometrics, the measurement and analysis of human characteristics, have been used to identify and classify populations for more than a century.

Michelle Spektor PhD ’23, the MIT-IBM Postdoctoral Fellow in Computing and Society in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), studies lessons from the past that can and should inform the use of biometric technologies in today’s world.

“I’m looking at the relationships between biometric identification and state power, politics of national belonging, inclusion, and exclusion in society, and thinking about how those dynamics change or stay the same over time, even as biometric technologies have been changing really significantly,” she says.

Read the feature in Spectrum here.

The U.S. government “does have a pretty long track record of getting involved with academia and industry to try to move the field of biometrics forward or to solve key technical problems related to accuracy or implementation,” said Michelle Spektor, a postdoctoral fellow in the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a historian of biometrics.

That includes the Face Recognition Technology program started by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the early 1990s, which built massive databases of facial images and developed recognition algorithms.

But government’s use of biometric identification on its own citizens “is quite limited compared to a lot of other countries…” she said. “Most of the most prominent uses have to do with border control, tracking immigration, visas and the like.”

Read the article in MLive here.