Southampton (ip-192.com): The complex nature of identity, both in the real world and online, is the focus of a three year study at the University of Southampton. The project, which will investigate ‘Super-Identities’, aims to tackle the issues associated with unreliable and counterfeit identification and provide a faster and more efficient way of combating the problem.
“The capacity to identify one another is vitally important,” said project leader Dr. Sarah Stevenage, Head of Psychology at the University of Southampton. “It underpins social dialogue, commercial transactions, individual entitlements to 
goods and services, and issues of legal and criminal responsibility. In today’s society, each of these activities can take place both within the real world and the cyber world, making the concept of identity and the process of identification, more challenging than ever before.”
Recent findings from Britons National Fraud Authority estimate that the risks of identity fraud, and its knock-on effects, cost the UK more than £2.7 billion ($4.15 billion) a year. “With the problems associated with identity-fraud becoming ever more of a financial burden to individuals and to society as a whole, we believe that the benefits from this research will be substantial,” Stevenage said. “With better tools for human identification, we will be more able to successfully protect our personal privacy and data security, whilst improving our ability to identify the true suspect in crimes against society.”
The assumption underlying the Super-Identity project is that whilst there may be many dimensions to an individual’s identity - some more reliable than others - all should ultimately reference back to a single core identity or a 'Super-Identity'. By collating information about real-world and online identities, (such as measures of the face, walk, voice, or online browsing behavior), the project seeks to find out how to recognize this core identity more effectively.
The first stage of the project is to define the set of identity measures across a diverse demographic of the population. Once this framework is in place, extensive testing will be conducted to determine the accuracy and reliability of automated and human identification from each measure, and from the combination of measures, in order to provide an identity decision in which you can have confidence. In light of the potential impact upon our fundamental human rights, social, legal and ethical concerns cannot be ignored. As such these aspects shall also be examined, with particular attention paid to privacy and data protection issues.
The £1.85 million ($2.84 million) project is funded by Britain’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under the Global Uncertainties Program. It is supported by the United States Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, under its Visualization and Data Analytics Program. The research team includes experts from automated biometrics, psychology, forensic anthropology, human-computer interaction, mathematical modeling, complex data visualization and IT law.
A three year study at the University of Southampton focuses on real and cyber identities. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com
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