October 24, 2007

A Report to TC 25/WG5

Professor Richard Doyle - Penn State University - United States

IN IEC 80000-14,Telebiometrics treats the domain of all possible inputs and outputs of a human being's emdodied (tele) presence as a signal with potential information - "wetware.". As we know, this information has great potential value for systems of human authentication that might one day enable ubiquitous encrypted human authentication and geolocation. IPV6, for example includes enough address space to provide an IP address to each and every human being (more precisely, to their telebiometric and GPS indices) on the planet. Yet because this \"wetware\" interface is essentially linked to the ongoing autopoietic activities of a human being, it is itself worthy of the very safety, anonymity and security that is the goal of any telebiometric authentication system protecting citizens and customers while enabling low cost and secure transactions as well as border crossings.

To further this goal of enabling new technologies of authentication while preserving the safety, security and anonymity of human beings, IEC 80000-14 has described the quantitites and units to be used in any telebiometric system in contact with wetware. Wetware can be defined as the treatment of a living system as a system of information, and helps to suggest that this framework of standard quantities and units and their letter symbols creates conditions for mapping the human body as an interface. Such a map of the range of tolerances of sound, pressure, light, etc represented across populations and diverse cultures is invaaluable to designing a new generation of human machine interfaces that capture the dynamic data of a human body and use it to manipulate and navigate information. The brain itself can be treated as such an interface, with the use of focused human attention to manipulate a cursor. So too could this learned capacity be spread across the body itself, with different bodily sites functioning as an extended "keyboard" for computer interaction without, for example, typing, but through the repetition and difference of diverse bodily gestures.

The next step after determining the proper quantitites and units and their letter symbols is to establish the safe thresholds for the operation of any such interface, and to that end I propose transforming our telebiometric database into a wiki'd database available for anonymous contribution. In this way we might gather sufficient and sufficiently diverse data to begin more fnely grained and higher resolution mappings of different bodily interfaces.

References

Serruya, Mijail D et al. \"Brain-machine interface: Instant neural control of a movement signal"

Nature, Volume 416, Issue 6877, pp. 141-142 (2002)

 Create your own educational wiki!Help Add to Del.ici.ous Add to Digg Add to Reddit Add to fUrl Add to SpurlPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS