The National Science Foundation has awarded a $250,000 Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) grant to three Clarkson University electrical & computer engineering professors to prototype advanced behavioral biometrics-based computer user authentication systems.
The broader impact and commercial potential of this project is in online fraud detection and prevention for large populations of users in industries such as healthcare, credit card processing and the retail banking business.
U.S. consumers lose $5.1 billion annually due to account takeover fraud and online shopping presents the greatest fraud risk. There is strong demand for online fraud detection in sectors such as e-commerce and financial services.
The project, titled “PFI-TT: Behavior-Based Account Recovery, Trust Assessment, and Continuous Authentication for Strengthening Online Identity,” involves the prototyping of new software for online fraud detection and prevention based on behavioral biometrics. The team will collaborate with industry partners to evaluate the market fit of the developed prototype.
The research team’s principal investigator is Professor & Director of Software Engineering Daqing Hou, who will work with co-principal investigators Associate Professor Mahesh Banavar and Paynter-Krigman Endowed Professor in Engineering Science and Director of the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) Stephanie Schuckers.
“This PFI award provides us with an excellent opportunity to translate nearly a decade of our basic research in behavioral biometrics into demonstration systems, so that we can further explore its potential commercial and societal benefits in offering secure and frictionless user authentication,” says Hou.
The project includes an entrepreneurial education and leadership development plan for the graduate students on the team that will include customer discovery activities, mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs in the biometrics business area, and innovation and entrepreneurship activities at CITeR. The project activities will also support underrepresented graduate students and provide research opportunities for undergraduate students from diverse groups.
Read more about this research at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2122746.