ORLANDO, Fla. — 25 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks transformed airport security in the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is looking toward the next generation of technology.
That could mean artificial intelligence playing a bigger role in the future of airport security.
People must apply in advance and still go through security screening.
Experience MCO visitors currently use standard screening and cannot use TSA PreCheck or other expedited screening programs.
For now, the Gateside program and MCO's Experience MCO program remain separate.
Sep 11, 2026 · via wesh.com
This talk explores an emerging alternative based on Implicit Neural Representations (INRs), which model biometric traits as continuous functions rather than discrete images.
Our speaker will conclude by discussing future opportunities for INRs in biometric recognition, continuous biometric templates, morph attack analysis, privacy-preserving biometrics, and multimodal biometric systems, arguing that continuous neural representations may provide a new foundation for the next generation of biometric technologies.
About the speaker Vishal M. Patel is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Johns Hopkins University.
His research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, image processing, medical image analysis, and biometrics.
Patel serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence journal and IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science.
Sep 11, 2026 · via biometricupdate.com
The researchers combined real images of trees from iNaturalist and the Auto Arborist Dataset with AI-generated images, then fed different combinations into a standard image-recognition model to see whether the synthetic images improved its ability to identify trees.
Synthetic images improved the model's ability to recognize trees when real images were limited, suggesting that AI-generated images could help supplement real-world data when photographs are scarce.
Lake said it's important that the potential of AI-generated images for these kinds of conservation efforts not be overstated.
In the study, he and his collaborators found that the synthetic images were less effective than real images overall in training the image-recognition model.
Real images contributed by everyday people provide that missing information.
Sep 11, 2026 · via miragenews.com
Trending Artsbridge and the City of Belpre are collaborating with students of Belpre High School art teacher Chad Stevens to paint a mural on a wall along Campus Drive leading to the high school.
Artsbridge Executive Director Lyndsay Dennis, who is also a member of Belpre City Council, said the mural celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
It came together after a resident suggested doing something with the wall, which has been blank for several years.
Sep 11, 2026 · via mariettatimes.com
Building automated speech recognition has become one of the most resource-intensive arms races in modern computing. For years, the industry standard has centered on scaling foundational transformer models across hundreds of thousands of hours of speech data to drive Word Error Rates closer to zero. Yet, as speech-to-text engines have become ubiquitously integrated into virtual meeting software, streaming platforms, and classroom tools, a fundamental limitation has become increasingly obvious to anyone relying on them for daily communication. While modern speech models are remarkably adept at transcribing vocabulary, they remain largely oblivious to the emotional tone, cadence, and urgency that give spoken language its actual meaning. In high-stakes technical environments—such as engineering sprint retrospectives, architectural design reviews, or advanced university STEM lectures—spoken dialogue is rarely delivered as flat prose. A slight upward inflection can turn an apparent statement of fact into a skeptical question; a sudden drop in vocal pitch can signal a serious warning about a code vulnerability; and an urgent delivery can differentiate a critical design constraint from a casual suggestion. When standard automated speech recognition strips these acoustic cues away, leaving behind an uninflected block of text at the bottom of a display, it creates what Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers call an intention gap. For deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals, the result is continuous cognitive strain, forcing them to guess speaker intent while rapidly darting their visual attention between slides, physical demonstrations, and disconnected caption windows. At the University of California, Irvine and Virginia Tech, HCI researcher Dr. Sunday David Ubur has taken an alternative engineering path to address this challenge. Rather than treating speech recognition solely as a sequence-to-sequence text translation problem, Dr. Ubur approaches the challenge as an asynchronous distributed systems and spatial computing problem. Across several years of published laboratory work, his research has centered on
Sep 11, 2026 · via hackernoon.com
Here’s a look at how life for air passengers has changed since then.
What happened to air travel in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001?
In some instances, travellers were able to transfer from US domestic flights to international flights without going through any further security checks, either.
Armed marshals and reinforced cockpits The Federal Air Marshal Service was expanded, with more armed air marshals placed on flights.
Post-9/11 security screening led to more people being subjected to questioning and searches at airports, however.
Sep 11, 2026 · via aljazeera.com
Social media posts shared hundreds of times have claimed that Kent Police’s facial recognition team said “around 76% of Dover protestors have previous convictions for domestic abuse, paedophilia, GBH or drug dealing”.
But this is false—it is based on a joke post from a satire account.
Kent Police confirmed the post was inaccurate and that it did not issue or recognise the statistic.
Hundreds of masked protestors caused disruption at the Port of Dover on Saturday.
The account which appears to have first posted the claim describes itself as an “obvious satire account” in its bio, but many people seem to think the statistic is genuine.
Sep 11, 2026 · via fullfact.org
Spectral-spatio-temporal representation In this study, we propose a novel multi-dimensional unified EEG representation designed to capture concurrent spectral, spatial, and temporal dynamics.
ShallowConvNet and DeepConvNet30: The reference shallow and deep convolutional pathways for EEG decoding, representing the filter-bank-like and the deep-hierarchy ends of the design space.
This evaluation aims to identify systematic variations in model performance that may stem from idiosyncratic neural patterns or inherent disparities in stimulus characteristics.
This clustering suggests that the same stimulus triggers highly divergent cognitive responses across different participants, reinforcing the challenge of intersubject variability in EEG decoding.
Another approach we hypothesize to be more effective for EEG decoding is self supervised contrastive loss.
Sep 11, 2026 · via nature.com
Clearview AI has developed an experimental AI tool that could extend a facial recognition search into broader automated research on a person’s online identity, background, and associates.
The prototype, called InquiryIQ, can conduct web and image searches, browse webpages, and run Clearview facial recognition on photographs it encounters.
Clearview has increasingly positioned facial recognition not merely to identify an unknown person, but as a starting point for gathering information and mapping possible relationships around that person.
However, it shows that using facial recognition to move from identification to personal information and relationships has long been part of Clearview’s technical conception.
The company says it documents each facial recognition search, including the probe image, the search’s purpose, and the user’s identity.
Sep 10, 2026 · via biometricupdate.com
iOS 27 lists three changes to VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader: richer descriptions of images, Live Recognition, and Action button integration.
Apple’s published record for those three items runs to about a dozen words in total.
Apple’s iOS 27 wording is that those descriptions become richer, which points to more detail than a short label.
Live Recognition is a name without a description Live Recognition appears in Apple’s VoiceOver entry for iOS 27 and nowhere else that Apple has published.
Action button integration, and which iPhones have the button The third item ties VoiceOver to the Action button, the customizable button Apple confirms on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max in its tech specs.
Sep 10, 2026 · via macobserver.com
We had just grabbed a quick breakfast when Michael Friedman unexpectedly joined us.
Yes, that Michael Friedman.
The "AP, Michael Friedman, my friend's cooler" rap lyric guy.
The A-theory and B-theory of time were concepts coined in 1966 by a philosopher and professor, Richard M. Gale.
The Pattern Recognition B-Theory Series 1 costs CHF 150,000 on strap and CHF 120,000 on bracelet.
Sep 10, 2026 · via hodinkee.com
Norway is considering tighter restrictions on smart glasses and other camera-equipped wearable technology as officials raise concerns about surveillance, facial recognition and personal privacy.
Karianne Tung, Norway's minister of digitalisation and public governance, said the government wanted stronger regulation as artificial intelligence is increasingly combined with cameras and microphones embedded in glasses, headphones and other everyday devices.
The proposals do not amount to an announced blanket ban on smart glasses.
One measure under consideration is prohibiting functions such as facial recognition when they are used to identify other people in public spaces.
Norway's government plans to establish an expert group to advise on regulation and privacy protections for wearable technology.
Sep 10, 2026 · via thedailystar.net
Starting in mid-2026, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) expanded its biometric identity verification program, TSA PreCheck Touchless ID, to 65 domestic airports.
The 65-Airport Milestone for TSA PreCheck Touchless ID Expanding Biometric Infrastructure Nationwide The expansion of Touchless ID to 65 airports by mid-2026 scales biometric infrastructure across the U.S. national aviation network.
Many travelers routinely compare TSA PreCheck, Clear, and Touchless ID to evaluate expedited security options.
When entering the general PreCheck screening area, follow overhead directional signs or floor markings designated specifically for "Touchless ID" or "Biometric Verification."
Touchless ID builds upon this modernized digital identity framework, creating a seamless pathway through terminal screening.
Sep 10, 2026 · via thetravel.com
Overview YOLOv11n-face-detection is a lightweight face-detection model from AdamCodd, built on the YOLOv11 nano architecture and fine-tuned for 225 epochs on the WIDERFACE dataset. It detects faces in images through the Ultralytics YOLO framework and is distributed as a model.pt PyTorch checkpoint. The most important consideration is its target range: it performs well on the WIDERFACE evaluation categories for easy and medium examples, but performance drops on hard examples and the model card states that it works best with frontal or slightly angled faces larger than 20 pixels. The supplied information does not report parameter count, input resolution, training batch size, hardware, inference latency, or VRAM requirements, so those values should not be assumed. Best use cases Face detection in ordinary photographs. The model is suited to finding human faces in images with frontal or slightly angled views. Its WIDERFACE validation AP reaches 0.9420471677096086 on the Easy split and 0.9210357271019756 on the Medium split, which supports use in common portrait, group-photo, and camera-image detection workflows. Lightweight face-presence filtering. A small YOLOv11 nano-based detector can serve as a first-stage filter before a recognition, alignment, or image-processing pipeline. For example, an application can detect whether an image contains a face, crop detected regions, and pass those crops to a separate face-recognition or quality-assessment system. The model performs detection only; it does not identify people. Face cropping for downstream recognition. The detector can provide bounding boxes for a later recognition system. This is useful when the application needs to locate faces before embedding extraction or identity classification. The model card does not provide recognition capability, identity labels, landmarks, or embeddings, so those functions require another model or a fine-tuned downstream system. Moderate-scale crowd and surveillance-image detection. WIDERFACE includes difficult face-detection conditions, and the model reports a Hard validation AP of 0.8099848364072022. That result
Sep 10, 2026 · via hackernoon.com
Real-time facial recognition in public spaces is illegal in most places, including New York, where the movie is set, and even in private spaces LFR use is tightly regulated.
Particularly given the response of Spider-Man’s police contact to his facial recognition use: “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
And the response of the law enforcement authorities using facial recognition on the Delhi protestors?
In the U.S., court records allege ICE officers used live facial recognition to identify people observing immigration enforcement interactions, and in at least one case revoke travel credentials.
Spider-Man, on the other hand, realizes that he has been tricked about who the “bad guy” is in the scenario in which he has illegally deployed live facial recognition in public.
Sep 9, 2026 · via biometricupdate.com
Concealing the use of unpopular spying tools isn’t anything particularly new for law enforcement—cops have been doing it for years—but it’s just as wrong now as it was 20 years ago.
This is especially troubling when many towns are signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR vendors with little to no public oversight.
This trend is certainly not lost on law enforcement agencies.
Hiding the fact that they’re using ALPRs from Flock and other vendors is one way of avoiding scrutiny and bad PR.
But law enforcement and their spy tech vendors keeping people in the dark about the surveillance technologies trained on them predates the Flock backlash by decades.
Sep 9, 2026 · via eff.org
About 8,200 Michigan residents received enhanced driver's licenses or state IDs bearing the same unfamiliar man's face and a generic birth date after a vendor printing error affected thousands of government-issued credentials.
The Michigan Department of State said the error involved a batch of enhanced licenses and IDs printed Aug. 26 by IDEMIA, the state's card vendor.
The image and birth date did not belong to another Michigan resident, according to the state.
Corrected cards have been mailed automatically, and affected residents do not need to request replacements.
Enhanced IDs and REAL IDs are not identical.
Sep 9, 2026 · via lawcommentary.com
In traditional farming, water use is typically high, and manual work is required on a regular basis, leading to inefficient use of resources and late crop disease detection.
In order to overcome these problems, this research suggests an IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) based smart hydroponics system for a sustainable agricultural system.
The application of AI image recognition for early disease detection and the real-time and historical plant data analysis for resource-management recommendations are suggested.
Hence, the study was proposed to develop the integrated smart hydroponics system which integrates AgriFlow, hydroponics, IoT, AI, remote access, and data driven optimization.
AgriFlow: An AI and IoT-Based Smart Hydroponic Farming System AgriFlow : An A IoT-Enabled Smart Hydroponic Farming System for Intelligent Monitoring, Automated Resource Management, and Plant Disease Detection AgriFlow: An AI and IoT-Based Smart Hydroponic Farming System 2.
Sep 9, 2026 · via verticalfarmdaily.com
Key takeaways from the Big Technology Podcast interview with Mistral AI CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch (January 2026): Models are commoditising fast.
With models converging, Mistral's focus is on enterprise applications and orchestration — solving the friction enterprises actually run into rather than chasing a "god model."
Mensch dismisses AGI as "too simple a concept"; real problems require specialisation, not one system that solves everything.
Open-source models let organisations run on their own terms, customise with proprietary data, and ensure no foreign provider can shut them off.
Mistral was first to release open-source models and sees itself as "the western open-source provider," filling a gap left by US companies that don't invest in open source.
Sep 9, 2026 · via app.dealroom.co
However, estimating the carbohydrate content of meals remains difficult, particularly for locally consumed foods.
Carbo AI is an artificial intelligence-powered mobile application that uses photographic image recognition, computer vision, and machine learning to identify foods, estimate portion sizes, calculate carbohydrate content, and provide instant dietary guidance.
The project was led by the Human Nutrition and Dietetics Team in the Department of Health and Biomedical Sciences, Technical University of Kenya, in collaboration with experts in computer science, medical physics, and software engineering.
Carbo AI aims to improve carbohydrate literacy, strengthen diabetes self-management, enhance nutrition counselling, and demonstrate the potential of interdisciplinary AI-driven innovations to improve health outcomes.
For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the seminar from 1:00pm.
Sep 9, 2026 · via lboro.ac.uk