Main Body

In the global information society, there is an ever-growing need to authenticate individuals. The Biometrics has emerged as highly reliable approach that can overcome several limitations of the traditional personal identification technologies. The automated biometrics deal with physiological and/or behavioral characteristics, such as a fingerprint, signature, palmprint, iris, hand, voice or face, which can be used to authenticate a person's claim to a certain identity or establish a person's identity from a large database. With the rapid technological advances in electronics and Internet commerce and with the increased emphasis on security, there will be a growing need for secure transaction processing using biometrics technology.

As the usage of biometrics is becoming popular, more concerns on the ethics, privacy and policy implications of biometrics are being raised. Further two previous conferences organized in 2005 in Brussels by the European Commission, and in 2006 in Washington DC by the US DHS and the US Visit Program, the European Commission has contracted an international consortium to organize the third international conference on ethics and biometrics in Asia. The consortium, RISE (Rising pan European and International Awareness of Biometrics and Security Ethics), led by the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship, gathers 9 institutions from Europe, United States, China and India. The 3rd International Conference on Ethics and Policy of Biometrics and International Data Sharing is organized by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and will be held on 4-5 January, 2010 in Hong Kong.

This conference will mainly focus on the ethics and policy research, with an emphasis on the interplay of two or more of the major focus areas. The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. The program committee especially encourages research papers in non-traditional topics.