Emerging biometrics and CSI technology and their applications in STEM

Biometric identification systems use physical features to identify individuals. The accuracy of these systems has greatly improved and they have a variety of purposes. While the progress of biometric systems has been amazing in such a short period of time, the ability for people to falsify their identity or gain access to another person's personal information has also become easier. The need for improvement and new biometrics has become more apparent than ever. Fingerprint and Iris recognition are a couple of the more well known biometrics that have been in use for years for personal identification and national security. Gait Recognition, Ear Recognition, Hand Geometry, Face Recognition, Speech Recognition, and Forensic Anthropology are a few new and emerging biometrics. These emerging biometrics have gained popularity for various reasons such as being very stable, unique across entire populations, and easy to collect without the knowledge of the subject.;While we need to continue to improve and create new biometric systems there is also a gap in students graduating from college with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees that have the ability to improve our current biometric technologies. There is a rising push to engage students early in their academic careers with STEM activities to encourage them to pursue a STEM career path. Studies have shown that students who are engaged in STEM activities early in life are more likely to pursue STEM degrees than students who are not exposed. Introducing young students to emerging biometrics can help bridge the gap by allowing students to see how they can use their STEM degrees in the real world. For each biometric that is analyzed in this thesis, there is a corresponding STEM activity geared towards students between the ages of 12-14. The STEM activities can be used to engage students and expose them to the wide variety of different STEM career paths they can pursue.