A virtual border control officer that picks up anomalies in interviewees' speech patterns is being tested at an Arizona-Mexico checkpoint. 

Developed by the University of Arizona in collaboration with the National Centre for Border Security and Immigration, the avatar kiosk is designed to speed up border procedures and checks. Using speech recognition and voice anomaly-detection software it can also spot subtle changes in an interviewees' speech patterns and flag these people up as candidates for further interrogation -- the plan is to let the avatar interview at least 1,000 subjects during the test period. 

The kiosk, installed at Nogales, Arizona, will be monitored by ordinary border control officers who will receive a rundown of the information gathered on their iPads. Responses the avatar perceives as suspicious will be coded green, yellow or red, with red highlighting the most worrisome exchanges. The kiosk -- which speaks in and can interpret both English and Spanish -- cannot actually detect lies, but by flagging up changes in vocal intonations and other speech patterns, it will indicate when human officers should probe deeper. An uncharacteristic pause, for instance, may suggest the interviewee is crafting a response rather than responding naturally. Initially, the university developed the system without the avatar, however they found that people would answer it in a mechanical, unnatural manner. By adding a human-like presence to the kiosk, interviewees are more at ease and speak to it in a relaxed fashion. All travellers going through the avatar checks will also undergo a face-to-face interview with an ordinary officer during the testing phase, as a safety measure.

The current model (an earlier one was tested in March 2012) has been updated to process "trusted travellers" -- those travellers deemed low-risk that have signed up to the US' fast-track security system (these travellers have undergone a series of pre-travel criminal or immigration checks). Trusted travellers must have a biometric fingerprint check and undergo an interview, two requirements the avatar kiosk is now equipped to fulfill. Another improvement from earlier incarnations is the kiosk's advanced speech recognition software -- prior models would miss interviewee answers if they cut across the avatar's questions, but the new system simply asks them to repeat the answer in these instances.

The next significant change would be to change the appearance of the avatar according to whether it speaks Spanish or English. "We are still researching the effects of changing how it looks right now and the cultural implications, so we were reticent to make any major changes," explained Aaron Elkins, a management information systems (MIS) researcher at the university who led the project.

The team plans to add ID scanners to the kiosk eventually, and there is also talk of adding infrared cameras, eye trackers and other non-invasive sensors that can pick up on physiological changes in an interviewee. Ideally, Homeland Security would like to subject interviewees to a series of physical checks, with sensors measuring temperature, pupil dilation and pulse rate -- however this seems to be a long way off considering the privacy regulations a system like this would have to overcome before being widely authorised. 

Nevertheless, other teams at the University of Arizona are working on just such a system. "Humans can maybe control two or three [physiological] cues at one time, but not all 15," commented Jay Nunamaker, an MIS professor at the university involved in a different avatar project which is narrowing down the 400 to 500 psychophysiological and behavioural cues exhibited by humans to 15 major subsets. "So it's inevitable that tell-tale cues will leak out no matter how hard people try to control them when being interrogated."

Source: Scientific American /  Image: Shutterstock


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