- PORTLAND, Ore. -- It may
not be long before you hear airport security screeners ask, "Do you
plan on hijacking this plane?" A U.S. company using technology developed
in Israel is pitching a lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses
of law enforcement officers, and its inventors say it can tell whether
a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple question
in real-time.
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- The technology, developed by mathematician Amir Lieberman
at Nemesysco in Zuran, Israel, for military, insurance claim and law enforcement
use, is being repackaged and retargeted for personal and corporate applications
by V Entertainment (New York).
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- "Our products were originally for law enforcement
use - we get all our technology from Nemesys-co - but we need more development
time [for that application]," said Dave Watson, chief operating officer
of parent V LLC (www.vworldwide.com). "So we decided to come out sooner
with consumer versions at CES."
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- The company showed plain sunglasses outfitted with the
technology at the 2004 International CES in Las Vegas earlier this month.
The system used green, yellow and red color codes to indicate a "true,"
"maybe" or "false" response. At its CES booth, V Entertainment
analyzed the voices of celebrities like Michael Jackson to determine whether
they were lying.
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- Besides lie detection, Watson said, the technology "can
also measure for other emotions like anxiety, fear or even love."
Indeed V Entertainment offers Pocket PC "love detector" software
that can attach to a phone line or work from recorded tapes. It's available
for download at www.v-entertainment.com. Instead of color-coded LEDs, a
bar graph on the display indicates how much the caller to whom you are
speaking "loves" you. V Entertainment claims the love detector
has demonstrated 96 percent accuracy. A PC version is due next month.
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- The heart of Nemesysco's security-oriented technology
is a signal-processing engine that is said to use more than 8,000 algorithms
each time it analyzes an incoming voice waveform. In this way it detects
levels of various emotional states simultaneously from the pitch and speed
of the voice.
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- The law enforcement version achieved about 70 percent
accuracy in laboratory trials, according to V Entertainment, and better
than 90 percent accuracy against real criminal subjects at a beta test
site at the U.S. Air Force's Rome Laboratories.
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- "It is very different from the common polygraph,
which measures changes in the body, such as heart rate," said Richard
Parton, V's chief executive officer. "We work off the frequency range
of voice patterns instead of changes in the body." The company said
that a state police agency in the Midwest found the lie detector 89 percent
accurate, compared with 83 percent for a traditional polygraph.
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- The technology delivers not only a true/false reading,
but a range of high-level parameters, such as "thinking level,"
which measures how much as subject has thought about an answer they give,
and "SOS level," which assesses how badly a person doesn't want
to talk about a subject.
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- How it works
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- Nemesysco's patented Poly-Layered Voice Analysis measures
18 parameters of speech in real-time for interrogators at police, military
and secret-services agencies. According to Nemesysco, its accuracy as a
lie detector has proven to be less important than its ability to more quickly
pinpoint for interrogators where there are problems in a subject's story.
Officers then can zero in much more quickly with their traditional interrogation
techniques.
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- V Entertainment is leveraging the concept to let consumers
in on the truth telling, eyeing such applications as a lie detector that
could be used while watching, say, the 2004 presidential debates on TV.
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- Called Ex-Sense Pro, the V software measures voice for
a variety of parameters including deception, excitement, stress, mental
effort, concentration, hesitation, anger, love and lust. It works prerecorded,
over the phone and live, the company said. V Entertainment recommends it
for screening phone calls, checking the truthfulness of people with whom
you deal or gauging romantic interest.
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- The display can show each measured parameter in a separate
window, with real-time traces of instantaneous measurements while flashing
the overall for each parameter, such as "false probable," "high
stress" and "SOS." Ultimately, the company plans to offer
versions of its detectors for cell phones, dating services, teaching aids,
toys and games.
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- All material on this site Copyright © 2004 CMP Media
LLC. All rights reserved.
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- http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20040116S0050
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