FB

Can you please provide our readers with a brief background on the events that led up to this project?

Major General

The need for an accurate voter list was the main difficulty in the current political uncertainty that is going on in our country. We also recognized that we had no identity document for each of our citizens. To satisfy these two needs we decided to build a correct voter list that was not tied to just a conventional photograph ID but rather do it digitally and build a database of the citizens, using their biometrics to identify them for the voter list and also for other administrative and future needs. So we decided to create a database of the citizens with biometric and demographic information that could be used for multiple needs. We were faced with accomplishing this task in a very short period of time to support the upcoming elections in Bangladesh.

This is how the project came into being. The Army stepped in to assist the Elections Commission and the Government in enrolling the citizens into the database with all the relevant biometric and biographical data.

FB

How did you decide on the companies you wanted to work with?

Major General

Once we established the need, recognizing the very short time frame, we established a road map of how to complete this massive task in a tight time period. We quickly realized that given the enormity of the project, no single supplier could manage the task without the management help of the government and all of its resources. With that in mind we designed the project into several areas and we decided that we needed specific companies for those areas…Hardware, Database Software, Biometric Software and so on. We also realized that we required a local partner that we could interact with easily and quickly. With this conceptual framework in place we turned our attention to finding the best suppliers to work with and BIO-key was one of those. We were in touch with many of the leaders in Biometrics to integrate their technology into our voter registration enrollment software and BIO-key’s software was very competent! This combined with Bio-key’s willingness to help with such a huge project in such a limited time and of course with a reasonable price, won the contract for them.

So to put it in a summarized form, the effectiveness and international rating of BIO-key’s matching software combined with an attractive price were very important to us. But it was BIO-keys extraordinary willingness to help us that led us select them.

FB

What were some of the challenges you faced?

Major General

Two of the challenges we have mentioned. First, the size of the project and second, the very tight timeframe involved - enrolling 80-90 million people within one year! The other challenge we faced was to have the logistical supplies in place again within such a short space of time and complying with the Governments purchase policies and procedures. For example we required 12,000 laptops to be deployed throughout the country and we needed 8,000 printers, paper, toner, etc. A huge logistical department needed to be put together to support the project.

But the biggest challenge was to recruit the right kind of people across the country to handle the software and the hardware to collect the biometric and demographic data. For example we hired and trained a staff of 18,000 computer and enrollment personnel throughout the country. In some areas the citizens may not have even ever been photographed in their lifetime!

Another significant challenge was how to manage the collection of the data and maintaining the enrollment quality as per the established standard. For example every day on average we had to collect data on 300,000 to 400,000 people, and check against duplicate or false entry.

So there were many many challenges and I could go on for some time describing them to you but these were the main ones.

FB

Given that this type of undertaking is a high priority for many countries around the world, do you see that your successful deployment will act as an example for others?

Major General

Quite definitely! I say this because as far as I know, never has a deployment of this magnitude been accomplished in such a short time period. Also from what I have seen, similar types of project have run into difficulties and run over a much longer period of time.

If this model is followed where the Government agencies and the military assist with the organizational elements and the project is being undertaken not only for voter registration but also leveraging this effort for multiple uses, with the same biometric and biographical data also being available for drivers licenses, passport, or other administrative purposes, then this model would work well in any county and be successful within a limited period of time and with a reasonable cost.

FB

Can you please tell us the background of your involvement in the Bangladesh Voter Registration Project?

BIO-key

We have been involved for the past year in a project in Bangladesh that will provide an opportunity for the country to hold a free and fair election i.e. one citizen – one vote. It is a monumental project because as we believe it today it is one of the largest Biometric deployments in the world. Our goal is to enroll all of the eligible voters in a data base and ensure there are no duplicates, producing a voter roll to be used at Election Day (the country is planning on holding their election at the end of this year or early next). That means in essence again – one citizen – one vote. The data base is being scrubbed for aliases ensuring that people have not registered twice, perhaps in different provinces or sections of the country. The United Nations has been promoting free and fair election for many, many years, but they have recently begun to get, especially in third world countries, very aggressive about providing the facility to do that. We have been fortunate enough to be involved in this project with a systems integrator on the ground in Bangladesh, Tiger IT. We have issued a number of press releases and made a number of announcements over the last year updating our progress, but what is paramount to this last announcement is that today we have over 75 million citizens enrolled in the system, and we are now checking duplicates and aliases on a regional basis preparing for the election. This has been a co-operative venture again between BIO-key here in the US and Tiger IT on the ground in Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Army that has been responsible for this whole process.

FB

Can you walk us through the registration process?

BIO-key

Yes, in fact not only can I walk you through it, we have videos that you could actually view on our web site at www.bio-key.com, to see how the process works. An individual comes to a central location. In the city they can make an appointment to enroll, in the out lying areas they literally just walk into a registration center. Their demographic information is taken and entered into screens on the computer – we then take images of four fingers and a picture of the individual and produce a credential, an ID card. So it is a very simple and straight forward process and it takes three to five minutes to enroll an individual. There are eight thousand enrolment stations that are positioned around the country to be able to do this.

FB

This is a very large project, probably one of the largest in the world as you were referencing earlier, what were some of the challenges you had to overcome?

BIO-key

Technologically we’ve had the capability to do this on a large scale basis. We have proven that with our evaluations at NIST and all the testing we have done on our technology, so this was not a monumental challenge technologically. The challenge is really political in nature and the integration challenge on the ground to manage the logistics of eight thousand enrolment stations. This requires eight thousand trained operators, who can take the information, capture the finger prints and do it all at a quality level that is required in order to scrub the population. The bulk of this challenge was really shouldered by the Bangladesh army and our partner on the ground – Tiger IT in Bangladesh.

FB

Is this the first time that you have done a project with Tiger IT or I think Cognitec was mentioned in one of the Press Releases?

BIO-key

Yes, the Cognitec Facial Recognition Software is being used to capture the facial images. It is the first time we have worked Tiger IT in Bangladesh and I can say they are one of the most professional and capable organizations that we have been involved with through the years.

It is not the first time that BIO-key has worked with on a large scale program like this. We enrolled better than forty million citizens for the general election in Nigeria that took place last April.

FB

This deployment serves two purposes. One is for the upcoming election that is taking place later this year, and the second is for the purpose of a national ID card. Can you tell us what that National ID card is used for?

BIO-key

The National ID card, which will be an off shoot of this particular project, will be used to manage access to social services that are available in Bangladesh. It also has the potential to filter into the commercial environment, banking, Health Care and so forth. So it will be a credential which is issued to an individual and stays with them for life, providing positive identification of their status in the country. It really is a monumental program, when you think about the ability to positively identify 80 Million individuals, to enrol and register them, not only in the third world environment but in general in any country around the world. We are starting to notice more and more demand for National ID’s in South America and again in the third world we are starting to see more and more opportunities. We expect along with Tiger IT to respond to a series of proposals that are now in play in a number of countries around the world.

FB

Can you tell us why BIO-key was chosen for this particular project?

BIO-key

Fundamentally we were chosen because we have technology that allows large scale finger identification matching on virtually any commercial infrastructure. Our solutions can scale to meet the requirements on virtually any server platform and are finger reader independent. We can enroll one Finger Print Reader and identify on another. We can run our backend server system on Linux, we can run it on Microsoft Windows, and we can run it on a Sparc Solaris platform. So we are totally independent of platform software or hardware. And we are totally independent of the fingerprint reader for the front end.

The second reason we were chosen is our ability to perform on a very large scale, and do one to many finger matching without any special infrastructure. We can do this on a local basis; we can do it across the web and the internet. So we have provided all of the software technology and flexibility that enables this registration and matching virtually anywhere, anyplace, anytime.

The third reason is our highest performance statistics and proof points as validated in testing by NIST. We are the top performing US based Biometric company and that proof point with NIST really puts us in a very strong position with the integrators that are looking to deploy projects of this magnitude.

We recently announced a $2,000,000 contract about 3 weeks ago where our software will be used in a similar nature on large scale deployments and I will be sharing more information with you about that soon.

It is clear that BIO-key has put all the pieces together and our patented technology is performing better than anything else in the market for finger matching.

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