The Marines have walled off Fallujah in the heart of Iraq’s volatile Anbar province—closing its dusty, labyrinthine roads to traffic. The only way into the ancient Sunni city is through a military checkpoint. The only way past a checkpoint is to have an identification badge that proves your residency. And the only way to get a badge is to have American soldiers snap your picture, scan your irises, and take all 10 of your fingerprints.

It's a scorching July morning at the edge of the desert, and one Iraqi after another walks single-file into a former schoolhouse barricaded with sandbags and razor wire. Those without ID badges are asked to give their names and birthdates and told to place each finger on glowing green scanners. Next, they are instructed to stare into a handheld, camera-like device that captures and stores the unique pattern of both of their irises. The information is then cross-checked against a database of detainees and suspected terrorists. The Marines use this high-tech fishing net to trap insurgents trying to enter the war-ravaged city.

But what if the target is the checkpoint itself? By the time a soldier goes to swipe a badge or create a new one, it could already be too late.

In January, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest killed 35 religious pilgrims and injured dozens more at a security checkpoint outside a shrine near Baghdad. Four months later, a man dressed in a police uniform killed four guards and seven civilians and wounded eight U.S. soldiers in an attack at a checkpoint in northeast Iraq.

Halfway around the globe, the sun set hours ago. But for a research assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and CyLab, there is still a grant proposal to finish, a technical paper to edit, and bugs to fix in the project demo for a Congressional delegation next week. After pulling another all-nighter, Marios Savvides is off to D.C. at daybreak for classified meetings with high-ranking military and intelligence officers. Savvides, who is also the founding director of the university’s CyLab Biometrics Lab, is developing biometrics technologies that could mean the difference between life and death in places like Fallujah.

The gray hair peppering his dark beard betrays his exhaustion, but rest isn’t coming soon for the 33-year-old cybersecurity expert. He knows firsthand what U.S. military forces face when they are stationed in unstable parts of the world—and he knows to savor the freedoms he now enjoys in America. Born in southern Cyprus, he spent his childhood moving every three years to countries such as Nigeria, Kuwait, Dubai, and Oman, where his father took posts as a field irrigation engineer for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, bringing food and a chance at survival to those without. The power of technology to improve the human condition did not go unnoticed by the son.

"He touched people who never even had a bowl of rice," Savvides recalls, "but they could make all the rice that they needed when he finished an irrigation project."

For the younger Savvides, hope flows not in the form of water, but electrical currents. In 1997, he earned his undergraduate degree in microelectronics systems engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in England. There, “just for fun,” he designed a computer-controlled security system that would instantly fax and email images of a room if thieves tried to break in the windows. "I was always into computer surveillance," says Savvides, adjusting the American flag lapel pin affixed to his sports coat. "I guess I just love being able to look at a screen and know what is going on around me."

It's a passion that followed him to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, where he was drawn by the university’s long, storied research tradition in face detection and tracking—the process of automatically locating human faces in digital images and video, as well as facial recognition, or determining whether two faces are the same.

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