A lurker writes:

You may know all this, but here are some details which may be of interest otherwise:

THE INTELLIGENT AIRPORT (TINA) PROJECT

Researchers from the universities of Leeds, Cambridge and University College London have teamed up with 10 companies on The INtelligent Airport (TINA) project, funded by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), led by Professor Jaafar Elmirghani of Leeds University.

‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID … We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

This project aims to develop a next generation advanced wired and wireless network to meet the potential requirements for future “intelligent airports”.
TINA website: http://intelligentairport.org.uk/

Travel Tracker 12 November 2007, The Engineer online:

Such a system is set to be installed and trialled at Heathrow’s terminal five, where an ‘intelligent gate’ will demonstrate, among other things, accurate passenger position estimation through active and passive RFID and radio over fibre (RoF) where the RFID is part of the boarding pass and/or passport.

Predictions suggest a terminal-wide network would have to support 10 million sources of information, from individual tracking units for passengers and staff to technology such as biometric gates. It is believed the system will have to deal with a peak data rate of 100Gbit/s as it tracks people, luggage, aircraft and all the information generated by those sources. …

Elmirghani : ‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID, which could be put into boarding passes and will soon be put in passports. Passengers can be processed a lot faster and tags could be used to track luggage so it can be handled in a more efficient way — tracked from arrival to being put on a plane.’ …

‘The system will use a radio-over-fibre distribution network with a distributed antenna system creating a unified structure. We are looking at passive kinds of radio frequency distribution. This will allow the basic systems of the infrastructure to be easily upgraded and updated. We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ …

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

full article here: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

Next Generation of Airports are on the Horizon , Leeds university website

A remote biometric scan that removes passport queues, airport lounge chairs that “nudge” passengers to remind them that their flight is due to board and boarding passes that locate passengers and provide automated access could be among the next generation of airport technologies that will transform airports and air travel in the future. Other new technologies developed in the project include radio frequency tags attached to baggage to help stop luggage from being lost. The same radio frequency tags will be given to passengers and coupled with wireless biometric devices, these will enable security staff to know where everyone is and who they are, helping make airport security more stringent and efficient, and also ensuring that passengers make it to the departure gate on time. Wireless technology could also allow passengers to use a portable inflight entertainment terminal which could be used in the departure lounge as well as on the plane. …

“We are hoping to achieve this within the next six years” – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani

full article : Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/news/index.shtml (scroll down)

TINA Project system technology

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques , UCL paper

from the conclusion :

…The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. […] However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage. … The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.”

PAPER:

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques
P. V. Brennan, A. J. Seeds, and Y. Huang
University College London, UK

Abstract:
Security and efficiency at airports has, in recent years, become a critical issue in the eyes of the general public, security services and politicians alike.. This paper presents a high-resolution, indoor location technique, based on RF-over-fibre, that is ideally suited to the monitoring of a high density of people and/or objects in such a situation.

extracts

[…]

The basic concept is for airports to be fitted with a network of combined RF-ID tag readers and high-resolution panoramic cameras, spaced at around 15–20m intervals, which are used to monitor the movements of people around the terminal building or buildings. Each passenger carries or wears an RF-ID tag, which can allow location to an accuracy of around 1m, and the video and tag data merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability with a wide range of potential benefits. The tags developed at UCL are transmit-only devices that do not store any data but emit a beacon with a unique ID at frequent, randomised intervals, at least once per second, and this is cross-referenced to passenger information already stored on the system — such as name, flight number and perhaps even biometric data. This gives the effect of intelligence in the tags — passenger information can appear to be ‘read’ from them though it actually resides on the computer system. The tags and reader infrastructure allow convenient monitoring of passenger flows and identification of late-running passengers.

The system can offer a number of benefits; it can be used to control entry to secure areas, allow the precise automated-tracking of certain individuals, help to evacuate the building in the event of an emergency, provide rapid location and imaging of lost children and help to ensure that large aircraft are boarded efficiently by detecting and locating stray passengers. The Optag/ TINA consortium have calculated that cost of flight delays due to late-running passengers amounts to some 150M Euros per year in Europe alone, so considerable savings are possible with a system of this nature. A high degree of functionality can be built in to the system, dependent largely on the ingenuity of the user interface.

PROTOTYPE SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The prototype Optag / TINA camera comprises a cluster of eight 1600 ×1200 pixel CMOS sensors, producing a 9600 ×1200 panoramic image. A portion of this image, or a lower-resolution panorama, is streamed to the central monitoring station using gigabit ethernet with the UDP protocol. The camera resolution allows recognition of a human face to 6m and detection to around 30m.

The tag system is rather challenging in that it is required to operate at relatively long range (10–20m), perform location estimates and simultaneously identify large numbers ( >1000) of tagged people or items in any given cell. To meet these challenges, the Optag/ TINA team have designed a unique tag protocol that sends short bursts of data, at randomly-varying intervals, with a mean update rate of twice per second. Each tag reader uses direction finding to establish the bearing of the tag and then two or more bearings are used to establish the location. The prototype tag board, operating at 5.8GHz, is shown in Figure 2. The peak tag output power is 10mW, but the mean output power is very much lower — around 20µW, many orders of magnitude below the threshold of emissions that would constitute any conceivable health risk. The prototype tag is a little larger than a credit card, but with miniaturization, could be very compact and easily incorporated in a small card or unobtrusive wristband.

The tag readers, shown in Figure 3, are based on four antennas and receivers mounted at 90-degree spacings, which perform amplitude-comparison direction finding [3] on each tag burst. This straightforward approach provides a reasonable accuracy of around 1m within a 10m radius. However, the effects of reflections, signal blockage in crowded environments and other propagation artifacts are likely to be significant and will most likely diminish the achievable accuracy.

[…]

The prototype system is designed with a 0.5s repetition interval equating to a mean update interval of 0.9s —indicating that the position of all tags can be determined and updated on a second-by-second basis. Thus the system can easily accommodate 1000 tags in any given cell, which is probably close to the limit of the number of people who can possibly be squeezed into a 10m radius area! …

[…]

A range of trials have been conducted in the departure lounge at Debrecen airport , Hungary. Both the camera and tag systems have been evaluated based on three cells each containing a camera and RF-ID tag reader unit. As far as the tag system is concerned, the location accuracy was assessed with the tag readers mounted both centrally and in the corners of the rooms and with a ‘passenger’ wearing the tag in a variety of locations and facing in several directions. Measurements were repeated in crowd situations in which the tag-wearing person was surrounded by other people.

The general conclusions of this trial were that the best positioning of the tag readers is in the corners of the room, location errors are indeed dependent on tag orientation and obstructions due to other individuals, and operating range exceeds expectations — 25m being easily accomplished even under the most adverse conditions.

CONCLUSION
The Optag / TINA projects have demonstrated the feasibility of a combined RF-ID tag and panoramic video monitoring approach in an airport environment, including a proof-of-concept trial in a Hungarian airport building. All indications are that the concept is sound, though any future adoption will require further development and commercialisation, in particular the network infrastructure and associated software to both operate the Optag/ TINA system and interface with existing airport computer systems and databases. The mode of deployment of the tag element of the system is controversial and somewhat critical to certain areas of operation. For instance, in a security context, it would be crucial to ensure that each person carries his/her own tag and does not lose or swap them. One way in which this can be achieved is to incorporate the tag in a wristband that sends an alert code should it be removed. The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. With suitable circuit miniaturisation, the wristband could be small and unobtrusive, perhaps made of thin card. However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage.

Current work is focusing on an alterative tag and reader implementation involving TDOA location exploiting RF-over-fibre transmission, which offers the prospect of significantly improved location accuracy and multipath mitigation Another area that has huge potential for future development is the user interface, where a whole host of features could be incorporated including, for instance, an additional, simple interface at departure gates to alert staff to late-running passengers; an automated monitoring and announcement system to contact such late-running passengers as and when required; extensive archiving facilities to store tag and at least a subset of video data; seamless linking of tag ID, personal data and biometric data and market research analysis of data, to aid the design of airport layouts for instance to optimise passenger flows or to feed into charging models for the various retail outlets. It is clear that, once such an infrastructure is in place, there is huge potential to make use of the capabilities in a variety of different manners, many of which have probably not yet been foreseen. The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank EPSRC and the European Commission, particularly Jean-Pierre Lentz, for their encouragement and support during this work

PDF : http://piers.mit.edu/piersproceedings/download.php?file=cGllcnMyMDA3cHJhZ3VlfDJQM18wMjU1LnBkZnwwNzAzMDkwODUyNTk=
HTML : MIT

TINA Project summary
from the EPSRC website (page for Cambridge University grant 2006-2009 )

Abstract:
Diverse applications are expected to appear in the future with complex and often varying service requirements, traffic profiles and user expectations. These will require extremely advanced adaptive computing and communication systems to provide users with mobile, secure and automatic means of conducting business. A prime application area is in international travel which continues to grow supported by a significant investment in infrastructure, such as Heathrow Terminal 5. An intelligent, adaptive, self-organising wired/wireless infrastructure is essential in this environment. It is anticipated that the considerable growth in the complexity of this infrastructure will not just be due to the proliferation of established fixed equipment such as wireless base stations, surveillance cameras, security detection equipment, display and terminal equipment. The requirements will also be for a much wider deployment of more compact portable equipment, for example, location and control equipment on a wide range of transportation equipment. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags supported by a transparent optical-RF network can be used to sense, locate and track an array of objects including luggage, mobile assets and commercial goods and can provide additional features such as boarding pass auto-tags and access control tags. These active RFID tags will operate at low data rates, typically 64 kbit/s, but an airport environment can be expected to contain a few million of them. Mobile biometric sensors will be widely deployed in this environment providing advanced features. A range of fixed and mobile terminals will provide additional security measures such as chemical detection and analysis, while other terminals, fixed and mobile, will support passenger information and entertainment services on transit. The infrastructure will support an array of personal passenger and staff wireless media rich devices. The wired/wireless network envisaged will thus be huge and complex, supporting perhaps 10 million information sources, with an anticipated peak aggregate data rate of order 100 Gbit/s in a relatively local access environment. This is beyond the capability of any current network and research is needed to understand the principles upon which an effective system could be constructed. As this is such an ambitious and multidisciplinary project, a collaborative programme is proposed. The project has strong industrial involvement and support from Laing O’Rourke who will provide the application context, share design experience, user requirements and architectural constraints and Marconi who will contribute expertise in complex communication system design. At the outline proposal stage, we received feedback from EPSRC that they would welcome additional collaborations with those involved in airport operations. We are delighted that, in response, BAA and Boeing have agreed to become involved in the project, and within UCL links have been made to Dr Paul Brennan, who will contribute substantial knowledge of RfID, being involved in a major European project in the area. Finally we have additionally sought to involve the equipment company Motorola and the installation planning company Red-M to ensure that we can receive expert advice across all areas within the project.

SOURCE http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/D076803/1

[…]

Thank you to the lurker who emailed this.

Right off the bat, this leaps from the screen:

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

This is the same old argument, proffered by imbeciles, anti intellectuals, ostrich posturers and dumbasses. “They are already half way up your ass, so why not push it all the way in“. These people cannot distinguish between the tracking your position as a consequence of delivery of a service you subscribe to (cellular telephones) and one that is compulsory, imposed by a government or its proxy. You can always turn off your cellular telephone at any time to hide your location. Compulsory tracking is an entirely different matter. Triangulation data from cellphones is not available to airports because they do not need it, cellphones have nothing to do with the operation of airports and there is no cross over whatsoever between the two services.

There are no benefits to giving up your liberty for security, especially when the security you are getting is not really security at all but Security Theatre, which is a lie and way to rob people of their human dignity.

I find it to be disgusting that there are people out there who think that they have the right to say what rights are worth losing for the general public, and then to blithley impliment systems that take away those rights, in the belief that they are doing what is good for everyone. Imagine that Jaafar Elmirghani believes, “..that overall there can be more benefits to society than some of the losses if we compulsorily circumcise all females in Britain.” There is no difference between that belief and the belief that tracking everyone everywhere at all times is worth the losses of personal liberty because ‘society’ benefits overall.

That is the true face of the thinking of these monsters.

As for ‘probably’ have issues, why, yes indeed professor, we do have a BIG problem with your snake-oil Security Theatre, and as we have seen, Terminal 5 has had to climb down on its absurd fascist fingerprinting plan.

I am convinced that all of this snake-oil is going to go the way of the dinosaurs. When the number of people being hurt by these systems reaches a critical mass, they will be abandoned, in the manner that I have previously described.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Idiocracy, Insanity, NIR, People, Politricks, The Facts.