Dr. Touradj Ebrahimi

The Wired News article Your Thoughts Are Your Password said

What if you could one day unlock your door or access your bank account by simply “thinking” your password? Too far out? Perhaps not.
 
Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, are exploring the possibility of a biometric security device that will use a person’s thoughts to authenticate her or his identity…
 
“Brain-wave signatures, represented as the EEG signals of a person … are different from one individual to another, even when they perform the same thought or task”, says professor Touradj Ebrahimi at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
 
But the very distinctiveness of brain waves that works against researchers in developing universal tools is an asset when building an authentication system. A security device wouldn’t need to interpret or understand the thought, but simply extract the repeatable features of the pattern and recognize a match. “A brain-based biometric can be as strong as DNA-based biometric”, says Ebrahimi.

Dr. Touradj Ebrahimi is Professor of Image and Video Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and Founder, Chairman and Scientific Advisor of EMITALL Surveillance SA. He is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Member of the Editorial board for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Associate Editor of EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, Associate Editor of SPIE’s Optical Engineering Magazine, Area Editor of EURASIP’s Image Communication Journal, and Associate Editor of Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis (ELCVIA).
 
Touradj’s publications include The MPEG-4 Book, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2003, Image and Video Communications and Processing 2003: Proceedings of Electronic Imaging Science and Technology 2003, 21–24 January 2003, Santa Clara, California, Compression of parametric surfaces for efficient 3D model coding, Surveillance Video for Mobile Devices, and Evaluating Perceptually Prefiltered Video.
 
His patents include: EPFL Swiss patent on digital image sequence compression, reference B – 322 CH, 1991, Sony International patent application on coding of color images by three component decomposition, 1993, Sony International patent application on a new singularity detector for signal reconstruction, 1993, Sony International patent application on pyramidal fractal coding, 1993, AT&T Bell Laboratories US patent application on a novel technique for motion estimation, segmentation and coding, 1994, AT&T Bell Laboratories US patent application on a novel technique for region based video coding, 1994, EPFL International patent on watermarking of compressed video, 1997 – Rockwell patent application on a view dependent texture coding technique for 3D data coding, 1998, Ericsson patent application on region of interest image coding, 1998, and Ericsson patent application on video summarization for universal multimedia access, 1999.
 
Touradj earned a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1989, took post-graduate courses in “Median and morphological filtering in signal and image processing” at the Tampere University of Technology in Tampere, Finland, and earned a Ph.D. in Digital Image Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1992. His mother tongue is Persian, he is fluent in French and English, and he knows basic German, Italian, and Japanese.
 
Look at his Yahoo! Online Calendar.