Cyprus company in EU project for AI border controls

A Limassol-based company is part of a Europe-wide project to create an AI-based border control system worth more than €4.5m.

R&D company Stremble Ventures Ltd is one of 13 EU-wide participants in the EU-funded project iBorderCtrl, which was set up in September 2016 and is planned to be complete by August 2019. The entire effort is being coordinated by European Dynamics Luxembourg, while participants come from Greece, Cyprus, the UK, Po-land, Spain, Hungary, Germany and Latvia.

The European Commission describes iBorderCtrl as an intelligent control system aiming to tighten Europe’s border control through the use of lie-detection avatars, while also diffusing pressure at borders by making procedures faster.

iBorderCtrl consists of a two-stage procedure. The first, the pre-screening test, be-gins at home, where travellers seeking to enter the EU or cross the continent’s bor-ders are required to upload various documents before being subjected to an inter-view by a computer-animated border guard.

Equipped with a ‘deception detector’ that analyses the micro-expressions of travel-lers, the lie-detecting avatar figures out if the interviewee is telling the truth and cal-culates the level of risk posed.

The second stage takes place at the border, where those who have been calculated as low-risk following the pre-screening test secure a faster procedure than those judged to be high-risk, who receive a more detailed screening.

According to the European Commission, “border officials will use a hand-held de-vice to automatically cross-check information, comparing the facial images captured during the pre-screening stage to passports and photos taken on previous border crossings.

“After the traveller’s documents have been reassessed, and fingerprinting, palm vein scanning and face matching have been carried out, the potential risk posed by the traveller will be recalculated. Only then does a border guard take over from the automated system,” the European Commission added.

The project will be tested in real operational scenarios in four EU countries, three of which have been announced: Hungary, Greece and Latvia.

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