University Campus Security--Biometric program provides positive identification at UGA

Jul 1, 1998 12:00 PM, KATE HENRY

Since its founding in 1798, the University of Georgia has been characterized by innovation. Located in Athens, Ga., about an hour northeast of Atlanta, the university is the oldest public institution in the United States and the flagship school in the University of Georgia system, which comprises 37 colleges.

Managing food services for the 30,000 students and 8,000 faculty and staff at the Athens campus is big business. In keeping with the school's pioneering spirit, director of food services Michael Floyd manages the enterprise with a biometric personal identification system that has been parlayed into a burgeoning building access control system on campus. The identification program, which is unique to a university, according to Floyd, has garnered considerable publicity for the school, and has kept the books of the department of food services squarely in the black.

History of the system When Floyd joined the University of Georgia Food Services Department in the mid-1980s, it was using a system of Identamat readers, which had been installed in the early '70s following a widespread fraud problem with the coupons being used for meal purchase at the time. As Floyd recounts it, the students had been duplicating the meal coupons, and a black market had developed, which caused the food service department considerable financial problems. A consultant was called in to address the problem, and he recommended the use of biometrics to provide positive identification.

"Another reason the school wanted positive identification was because one of the other recommendations the consultant made was to implement an all-you-can-eat, unlimited-access, unlimited-food program," Floyd adds. "The university needed a foolproof way to make sure the customer coming in the door is actually the person who paid for that food."

The Identamat machines were one-dimensional hand readers that measured the length of the fingers, but according to Floyd, they were not designed for the volume of use the school put them through and began to show wear and tear. Upon arriving at the school, Floyd's initial challenge was to lead an intensive search for more advanced replacement equipment.

"The first thing we found when we went back to the college food service market was there were no biometric identification systems out there being sold to the college food service industry, so we immediately changed our focus and made contacts with the security industry," Floyd explains.

Floyd points out that the key to the success of a biometric system is repetitive use, and that not all security systems are made for repetitive-use applications such as food service administration. Floyd and his department looked at several systems and ruled them out. "We decided an eye scan system was not user-friendly in our environment," he says. "We also looked at a fingerprint system, which initially impressed us, but the salesman made the deadly mistake of saying you could get a printout of the fingerprints enrolled in it, and we did not want people to think we were keeping fingerprints on our customers.

"We also tested a signature verification system. We were impressed with the system itself and actually ran it for about a month and a half, but the problem was it took 15 seconds after you signed your name for the system to identify the user."

One of Floyd's search criteria was that the access system had to get a person in the door in less than 8 seconds, which is how quickly food services can move a person down its serving line. The system that did the trick was the HandKey hand geometry system from Recognition Systems.

System implementation and upgrade "The initial system we chose was a stand-alone, three-dimensional hand-and-reader system in which we could encode all of a customer's information on a meal card, and the card would become the carrier of the information," explains Floyd. The university ran the system for about five years, and though Floyd points out that it had tremendous advantages over the old system, it still posed two major problems: * The only way to deny meal access to a customer (in the case of a bounced check for instance), was to physically pick up the card from the student. "We ended up using a makeshift solution," says Floyd. "We would go to each reader and erase the memory of a (non-eligible) student's hand. That way, when the student would present his hand, the number and the and image wouldn't match, so the reader wouldn't let him eat. "But that required that we go to every reader to do that, which was incredibly time-consuming," he says. * The other problem the school ran into was having the student carry all the information on the card. It forced food services to see students every quarter to revalidate the cards - a lot of repetitive administration. So, in 1995, when the campus was putting forth a strong push to consolidate the many identification systems on campus into a one-card system, Food Services switched to the next version of the Recognition Systems reader. One of the criteria that food services gave in order for it to buy into the one-card system was that it had to be a biometric system. "The university recognized that we already had a viable identification system in place and that we also had a track record with it," he says. With the one-card system network in place, food services was able to tap into the campus network to communicate all the biometric data to the readers. Also eliminated was the need to see students every quarter for meal plan administration. "The new one-card system has eliminated the amount of processing we go through and has made our program much more customer-friendly," says Floyd. Students now have two choices when they go to eat: * they can take their student ID card, which has their student ID number encoded on the mag stripe, swipe it in the reader, then place their hand and it recognizes their hand; or * they can punch in their student ID number on the keypad and then place their hand to be scanned, so they don't have to carry their ID card with them. Floyd says that about 90 percent of his customers do not use their ID card, and really enjoy the freedom of that.

System expansion The one-card system also controls access to the student recreation facility, and by the end of the year, it will control access to the campus residence halls as well, says Floyd.

According to Floyd, each department operates its portion of the system, so food services, for instance, has all its information available in its own database, which it maintains, and housing is in charge of maintaining residence hall information on students. In the campus housing applications, for instance, says Floyd, they have disabled the keypad, because they do not want students to have the option to be cardless. Recognition Systems readers are expected be at all the dorms by the end of this year.

Floyd says that having a positive identification system has eliminated a tremendous amount of fraud and food being shared, because it verifies that only people who have paid are eating. It has saved the university money in food costs, and, he adds, as access equipment, the systems are actually cheaper than standard college food service access control equipment.

For the time being, Floyd sees no need for an upgrade within the food services department, in part, due to the satisfaction of food service customers, but as for the future, "One potential upgrade that I see in our area is to have the readers interface with our timekeeping system for staff. It's a vision that is doable, because timekeeping systems out there are already capable of interfacing with biometric systems."

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