Keynotes
Sheldon H. Jacobson
The Future of Aviation Security includes Facial Recognition. Are you ready for it?
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is going full throttle on facial recognition, using Credential Authentication Technology (CAT-2) as its platform. With it comes the usual pushback based on personal privacy, including a group of senators who have put forward the Traveler Privacy Protection Act to stop facial recognition use by the TSA for airport security. This talk provides an overview of airport security and how facial recognition fits into the risk-reduction calculus for airport security. A roadmap for the future of airport security is provided that relies heavily on facial recognition (and perhaps other biometrics) that will transform airport security from a process of stopping prohibited items from entering the air system to reducing air system risk by better knowing the population of air travelers and keeping risky passengers from entering the air system.
Laura Albert
Smarter Decisions for a Secure World: A Roadmap for Operations Research
Homeland security has gone through a significant transformation since the events of September 11, 2001, and it continues to evolve. In the last 20 years, the operations research community has stepped up to study homeland security and critical infrastructure protection, which has led to many advances. However, recent events have highlighted the enormous number of challenges that remain and require expertise from the operations research community. These topics have been central to my academic research career, which has focused on applying methods from operations research and analytics to applications in aviation security, cyber-security, network restoration, and election resilience. In this talk, I will summarize policy insights from my research and offer guidance into challenges that the research community can tackle, with the goal of motivating new research that can help move homeland security research forward over the next decade.
