Wolfe's Den: IBM Patenting Airport Security Profiling Technology

A dozen "secret" patent applications define a sophisticated scheme for airport terminal and perimeter protection, incorporating potential support for computer implementation of passenger behavioral profiling to detect security threats.

By Alexander Wolfe,  InformationWeek 
Jan. 19, 2010 
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222301388 

A dozen little-known IBM patent applications lay out a sophisticated computer-analysis-based approach to airport security. The technology has the potential to apply profiling of passengers, based on attributes such as age and type of clothing worn. One of the patents IBM is seeking even appears to go Israeli-style security one better, using analysis of furtive glances in the application entitled "Detecting Behavioral Deviations By Measuring Eye Movements."

The objective of the technology in the passel of patent applications is to alert officials to potential terminal and tarmac threats using a network of video, motion, chemical, and biometric sensors arrayed throughout the airport. The sensors feed into a grid of networked computers, which provide high-powered processing to get results to officials in so-called real time, yet the systems are compact enough to be located on-site.

The "secret sauce" in the set up is a software "inference engine," which crunches the data fed in by the multitude of sensors, separating the high-risk wheat from the false-alarm chaff. That engine uses heuristics and rules developed by the three co-inventors behind the patent applications--Robert Angell, Robert Friedlander and James Kraemer.

"These patents are built on the inference engine, which has the ability to calculate very large data sets in real time," Angell told me last Friday.

He called me because he was surprised I had uncovered one of the patents, which I wrote about recently in my blog post, " Obama Security Push Spurring Scanner Patents (IBM's Seeking One)." That post focused on the patent application "Risk assessment in a pre/post security area within an airport."

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