"There are two wonderful components of mathematics: first of all the beauty of its concepts and tools, and then the usefulness in its applications."

UMBC: Is there an easy, layperson's description of what you do?

AR: I'll do my best! One of the problems I'm in involved in at NIST involves biometric signatures, which means fingerprints, eyelids, faces - things of this nature that cannot be forged or forgotten. It's very important for correct identification of a person for the reason that no one can assume those [traits]. If, for instance, someone flies into BWI Airport and a picture has been taken of this person because they look suspicious, there is a database of pictures and you ought to compare the picture of this person to the database in Washington or elsewhere to see if they are there.

UMBC: How do you make the leap from mathematics to facial recognition technology?

AR: First of all, a picture is nothing but a large number of pixels, or dots. From the point of view of mathematicians, each picture is a collection of dots that you can treat as points in a very high dimensional space.

UMBC: Does your work at NIST and UMBC overlap or complement each other?

AR: Yes, I think so because I find many real-life examples from NIST to teach in my courses at UMBC. And of course, the statistics knowledge I have is useful as a statistician at NIST, a position I'm very proud of.

UMBC: How can your work be applied in today's world?

AR: You have several commercial algorithms, one for recognizing a person's face and one for fingerprints or something like that. You want to combine those, to take the best of each of them. One aspect of my research was the fusion of several biometric algorithms because two is better than one. Right now there is even a program suggested by NIST to combine fingerprints and images for visas for people from Mexico. So that will implement the program more universally. This is being used mostly for Homeland Security but I mostly know mathematical problems, which I need to solve for people who have more knowledge and training [in the applications of the statistical solution].

UMBC: In what others ways have you employed mathematics in real-world scenarios?

AR: I'm also involved in projects involving international comparisons of standards, which are important in commerce to assure that the standards used in the United States are met by products produced in Turkey or Singapore or China. This is related to manufacturing concerns. Another project I was involved in was testing generators of random numbers--banks, activities on the Internet. If a password isn't chosen at random, someone has a good chance to break it and get your money.

UMBC: When you are not working on complicated algorithms, what do you enjoy doing?

AR: I like to read books on history and I like to go to the UMBC swimming pool. I'm not a big swimmer, but I enjoy it very much. I have two children and a wife who is retired. In Russia, she was a microbiologist.

UMBC: Many young people do not continue into advanced mathematics. What would you want to tell them about mathematics?

AR: I encourage people to study mathematics and statistics. It's very exciting. I would want them to know how important the applications are, how beautiful it is, really. That's what I would try to tell them. There are two wonderful components of mathematics: first of all the beauty of its concepts and tools, and then the usefulness in its applications.