You’re going to need a bigger lab: BixeLab reveals new facility, contract, projects

BixeLab has revealed a new contract, introduced a new executive and teased a forthcoming report while showing off its new facility with a hybrid event.

Dunstone introduced the leadership team, including new CTO Barnaby Twyford, who joined BixeLab and its sister organization Biometix in July.

He reviewed the company’s growing list of test services, including biometric liveness detection and presentation attack detection (PAD), matching accuracy, injection attack detection and document authenticity checks, as well as evaluations of bias and age assurance.

BixeLab was the first lab in the world to conduct bias evaluations based on the ISO standard, and conducts tests in accordance with NIST’s NVLAP, FIDO Alliance and MOSIP specifications.

For systems that have already been deployed, BixeLab offers operational evaluations.

Dunstone also spoke about BixeLab’s core commitments to accuracy, transparency, privacy and innovation, and then moved onto the features of the company’s new laboratory.

The new facility features more mobile devices simultaneously, more advanced deepfake testing, more flexible replication of different types of environments and sequestered data processing facilities, according to the presentation. Robotic testing capabilities also give BixeLab the ability to perform more tests with more controls.

Multi-year contract with a national govt

“We just recently signed up a multi-year agreement with the government in New Zealand to help them with all of their testing and assurance services.” That agreement follows biometrics evaluations conducted for New Zealand by BixeLab.

The Malaysian Government’s CSM will visit BixeLab “next week” to learn about testing, Dunstone said, in an example of the kinds of educational programs the company provides.

Looking ahead

BixeLab is planning to publish a report soon on the application of the OFIQ biometric quality standard to airport environments, which Dunstone believes will be the first of its kind.

BixeLab is also building a “Government in a box” out of open-source components to show stakeholders how digital government can work.

The company anticipates more requests for testing around emerging challenges including bias and age assurance are likely to increase over the next year. In the longer run, testing related to deepfakes and AI agents is likely to increase.

“When an AI agent is out in the world doing things for you, how can it do things on your behalf? How is it trusted? How can the various people that need to trust that bot know that it was you who authorized that? Ultimately if you trace the chain back that has to come back to some form of biometric anchor,” Dunstone explained.

The company’s expertise in how people, probability and structured testing fit together also gives BixeLab the ability to test non-biometric AI systems, Dunstone says, like surveillance systems and large language models (LLMs).

Article Topics

biometric data quality  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometric matching  |  biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  BixeLab  |  digital identity  |  IAD certification  |  presentation attack detection