Mexico Border Station

People crossing the Mexican border into Nogales, Ariz., this week will have a chance to meet U.S. Customs and Border Protection's newest officer—a polite yet no-nonsense bilingual gatekeeper with a thick shock of black hair and a striped gray tie. He may not have a name or join his fellow officers for coffee or lunch breaks, but his presence will likely be welcomed both by them and the commuters who regularly pass through this southern Arizona outpost on their way to and from Mexico.

That is because the new recruit is an avatar, a virtual border patrol officer residing in a kiosk developed by researchers at the University of Arizona to facilitate border crossings.

CBP is actually installing an updated version of the University of Arizona's kiosk—the original was tested at the station from December to March—to determine its ability to help enroll applicants in its Trusted Traveler programs at the Mexican border. The programs, also available for airline passengers, were created after 9/11 at various ports of entry into the U.S. to expedite preapproved, low-risk travelers through dedicated lanes and kiosks. All Trusted Traveler applicants must voluntarily undergo a background check against criminal, law-enforcement, customs, immigration, agriculture and terrorist databases. The process also includes biometric fingerprint checks and an interview with a CBP officer.

In Nogales, human CBP officers monitor the avatar-administered pilot-test interviews, which provide them with automated feedback uploaded wirelessly to an iPad tablet that these officers can use to conduct follow-up interviews. Exchanges that the avatar flags as questionable and worthy of follow-up interrogation—using its speech recognition and voice anomaly–detection software—are color coded green, yellow or red to highlight the potential severity of questionable responses. Everyone who applies for Trusted Traveler status at Nogales ends up speaking with an officer after her or his avatar interview. One of CBP's goals is to implement several kiosks that can administer preliminary interviews that save time by making the follow-up, face-to-face interviews more efficient.

The kiosk is not designed to indicate that an interviewee is lying or to diagnose that person's intent, says Aaron Elkins,Find solar panel from a vast selection of solarpanel. a University of Arizona postdoctoral researcher in the Management Information Systems department who helped develop the kiosk. Instead the kiosk analyzes an interviewee's voice for anomalies that may prompt a border officer to probe deeper into a particular response.

Anomaly detection is based on vocal characteristics—changes in factors such as rate, volume,Canvaz offers quality oilpainting reproductions from famous artists. pitch and intonation—that may be related to different emotional, arousal and cognitive states. An inflection in one's voice may indicate uncertainty, or a pause might imply that an interviewee may have been devising a deceptive answer, Elkins says.Build a "floortiles" by dragging the corners of a quadrilateral. The kiosk's speech recognition software monitors the content of an interviewee's answers and can flag a response indicating when, for example, a person acknowledges having a criminal record.

Unlike its predecessor, which conversed only in English, the new Nogales kiosk speaks and understands both English and Spanish. The researchers also enhanced the speech recognition software. One of the problems with the first kiosk was that interviewees sometimes began answering a question before the avatar was finished asking it, causing the kiosk to miss the initial portion of the answer. The newer version is designed to more quickly detect when an interviewee is speaking and can prompt interviewees to repeat an answer if it does not understand a response.The Transaction Group offers the best highriskmerchantaccount services,

The idea that physical cues can be used to determine intent often enough for a system to be both fair and effective remains unproved. This is why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) program has caught a lot of flack from privacy watchdogs, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). FAST proposes that travelers be subjected to an array of sensors measuring pulse rate, skin temperature, breathing, facial expression, body movement, pupil dilation and other physiological and behavioral factors to determine whether they are a security risk. The DHS has tested the technology, in the works since 2007, but its future remains unclear.Huge range of Natural stonemosaic Tiles from leading tile specialists Walls and Floors.

CBP contacted Elkins and his colleagues last year because it needed help processing a backlog of applications for its Trusted Traveler Programs. Although CBP gave them only about a month to build their first working prototype, the researchers jumped at the chance to take their "embodied conversational agent," as Elkins calls it, out of the lab and into a real-world setting.