Border Security

There have been several notorious cases of border security failures where known bad actors were allowed to cross the border and in some cases caused loss of human life. These border security failures were due to failures to successfully match the bad actors’ names against watch lists.

Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy

The nature of border security means that a large percentage of the names to be screened are international, some of which are transliterations from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Cyrillic. As a result, name matching for border security is particularly challenging, requiring a highly accurate name matching capability that can handle a wide range of name variant phenomena. NetOwl, the winner of the MITRE Multicultural Name Matching Challenge, provides the most accurate name matching through its innovative machine learning-based approach.

Real-time Screening

In a border security scenario, time is of the essence. Every day millions of travelers go through airports, sea ports, and land ports of entry. Border screening must take minimal time to avoid delays and to keep lines moving.

NetOwl performs name matching against tens of millions or more records with sub-second response times to support real-time screening.

Beyond Name Matching

In addition to names, other attributes such as date of birth, place of birth, and nationality are typically checked against watch lists. NetOwl’s identity matching product performs matching based on evidence from any combination of such attributes. It provides high performing matching models for several entity types besides person names (e.g., date, place, organization, address). Additionally weights can be assigned to each attribute to reflect the most appropriate business rules for border security.