Over the past two days the AMBER project members have met in the beautiful setting of Salamanca, Spain to hold our second research conference. This event follows on from our last event which was the second workshop held in Warsaw, Poland last year.

For this event we have seen our early stage researchers “pitch” their research in a three minute presentation to demonstrate how they can summarise their research for a non scientific audience. This exercise was based upon the 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) competition from the University of Edinburgh, originally created by University of Queensland. Have a look here: https://bit.ly/2HpBhjg.

On our first day we also heard from Professor Stephen Elliott, of The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), Purdue University (https://bit.ly/2H7aUzA) on the challenges of biometric data collection. This included discussion on mobile data collection efforts, encompassing challenges associated with mobile data collection, surveillance cameras for face recognition at a distance, and longitudinal studies of face, finger, iris modalities on infants.

In the afternoon our academic partner Professor Raul Sanchez-Reillo went through the complexities of data presentation and analysis. This provided in depth guidance to the audience on the expectations of publishing papers.

Today we wrap up the conference with a scientific paper review exercise. A group of anonymous papers were provided to the group to “review”. Each group has presented back with interesting feedback.

We look forward to our next meeting which will be held in November 2019 in Germany.