Biometric Recognition at Scale: India’s National ID System (Aadhaar)

Tuesday October 27, 2026, 1:00 – 2:00 PM, POPP MARTIN STUDENT UNION, ROOM 340GHI

Dr. Anil Jain, Douglas E. Zongker Endowed Professor & University Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University

Abstract
Marvin Minsky, often referred to as the father of Artificial Intelligence (AI), defined AI as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.” This definition applies equally well to several allied fields, including biometric recognition—the automated recognition of individuals based on their physical and behavioral characteristics.

While you may not be familiar with the term biometric recognition, you likely use biometrics regularly—for example, when you unlock your mobile phone with your fingerprint or face, or pass through TSA or immigration checkpoints at airports, where biometric data may be captured and compared against stored records. Major drivers of biometric technology include applications in law enforcement and forensics, homeland security, prevention of fraud in social welfare programs, protection of personal data, and physical access control. Key enablers include advances in sensing and computing, algorithms for biometric feature extraction and matching, and access to large datasets for model training.

Despite remarkable advances, deploying biometric recognition at scale raises fundamental questions: How accurately can a person be recognized among millions—or even billions—of individuals? What causes recognition errors, and how can they be mitigated? And how can biometric systems protect the security and privacy of highly sensitive personal data?

These topics will be explored in the context of Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identification system, serving approximately 1.48 billion people in India and conducting about 100 million biometric authentications per day.

Bio
Anil Jain is a University Distinguished Professor and Douglas E. Zongker endowed professor at Michigan State University where he has taught and conducted research for over 50 years. For his seminal contributions to pattern recognition and biometrics, Jain was inducted into the United States National Academy of Engineering (2016), Indian National Academy of Engineering (2016), The World Academy of Sciences (2019), Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019) and the National Academy of Inventors (2015). He is a recipient of the Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships along with the IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize. More recently, BBVA Foundation granted him the prestigious Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies (2025). Jain has a h-index of 223 and over 290,000 citations to his publications.