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FUTA STUDENT WINS L'OREAL-UNESCO WOMEN IN SCIENCE FELLOWSHIP


 On the 6th of December, 2018, Olanike Akinduyite a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology, Akure  along with 14 others (12 Ph.Ds and 2 post-docs) won  the L’Oreal-UNESCO Fellowship  Award  For Women in Science Sub-Saharan Africa . The ceremony was held in Nairobi, Kenya. Also, in September 2018, she was selected among 200 most qualified young researchers in Computer Science and Mathematics from all over the world to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), which was held in Heidelberg, Germany.
 Olanike Akinduyite   graduated as  the 3rd best graduating student from the department of computer science FUTA and won the First Bank of Nigeria Plc, Award in 2007.  Her quest for more knowledge inspired her to pursue a master’s degree at the same department in FUTA. According to her “as Oliver Twist will always want for more,  I am still not satisfied with my level of attainment in the field of Computer Science” .she is currently undergoing a Ph.D degree in Computer Science with  specialization in security and privacy focusing specifically on biometric security.
In 2017, she became an Alumni of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), in Trieste, Italy  where she attended the CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School. She received a Super Computing (SC17) Travel Grant, to attend the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis: Super Computing 2017, at the Colorado Convention Centre, Denver CO as a student volunteer and has produced four publications in line with her studies.

Her work aims to provide solution to one of the biggest challenge facing biometric technology which is the secure storage of biometric templates.  In spite of the numerous advantages of biometrics-based personal authentication systems over traditional security systems based on token or knowledge, increasing use of biometric technology has raised many concerns and one of the biggest challenges is the secure storage of biometric templates. More specifically, once biometric data are compromised, they remain compromised forever due to their limited numbers (for example human beings have two palms, ten fingers, two eyes, etcetera.) and the privacy concerns arise from the fact that biometric data are tightly bound to a person’s identity such that they can be used to violate their privacy because a theft of biometric is a theft of identity. According to her, recently, combining biometric technology with traditional cryptography is emerging as a powerful solution to securing biometric templates for authentication in a security sensitive environment. However, these security techniques are individually faced with concerns hindering their dependency for authentication systems. In order to overcome individual drawbacks of biometrics and cryptography for authentication, recent researches now seek to combine concepts from these two techniques so that a secure biometric templates database can be built for authentication systems. Olanike seeks to leverage on the strengths of both fields to build a secure biometric template database.