Nilekani foresees smart phones with iris cameras

Bengaluru, January 5: With biometric sensors becoming popular and cheaper, Infosys co–founder ndan Nilekani on Monday predicted emergence of smart phones with iris cameras for authentication.

“As biometric sensors get popular and cheaper, the next generation of smart phones will have iris cameras built into them. In a year or two, we will have sub–$100 smart phones with an iris camera that does authentication of the Aadhaar number,” Nilekani, a former Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chief, said at an intertiol technology conference here. Noting that innovations in information and communication technologies (ICT) have led to emergence of many devices like smart phones or tablets that can do fingerprint authentication using biometric sensors, he said by following the hour glass architecture, the UIDAI was able to build a set of fincial applications to eble citizens avail the direct benefit transfer schemes into their bank accounts.

“The concept of hour glass architecture is important for scaling innovation on the application side and the technology (sensor) side, as evident from the Aadhaar project, in which we had the task of getting 1.2–billion people have a unique identification at a pace, which was sustaible and scalable,” he said. Under the chairmanship of Nilekani, the UIDAI has been able to provide Aadhaar number to about 730 million people till date, as its platform has been built to generate one million unique identification numbers a day for diverse applications such as cash transfers, online authentication and withdrawal of money, among others. The central government has also implemented an Aadhaar–based attendance system for marking presence of its employees across the country. “When we designed the open architecture for the Aadhaar project, we looked at the internet and the GPS (global positioning system) model. Once GPS was put into the commercial domain, a host of innovations have led to using it for location–based services such as maps,” Nilekani told about 1,000 delegates participating in the 28th intertiol conference on VLSI design here. (IANS)