From Research to Reality: Face Authentication in the Age of Deepfakes
Speakers
Chief Technology Officer • Trust Stamp
Professor and senior researcher in biometrics security and privacy • Idiap Research Institute & UNIL
Prof. Sébastien Marcel (IEEE Fellow, IAPR Fellow) received his Ph.D. in signal processing from Université de Rennes I in 2000. His work focuses on signal processing, pattern recognition, and machine/deep learning, with a strong emphasis on biometric security and privacy. Since June 2025, he has been part of the Interim Management Team at the Idiap Research Institute. He is a senior researcher and head of the Biometrics Security and Privacy group, leading research on face, speaker, and vein recognition, attack detection (including presentation attacks, morphing, and deepfakes), and template protection. His group is strongly committed to reproducible research and open-source tools. He is also a Professor at the Université de Lausanne, where he teaches biometrics at the School of Criminal Justice. Previously, he lectured at EPFL on statistical pattern recognition at the Doctoral School. Prof. Marcel has served in several editorial and leadership roles, including VP Conferences of the IEEE Biometrics Council and Associate Editor for multiple IEEE journals. He has been Guest Editor and Co-editor for special issues on biometric security and is the lead co-editor of the Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing (Editions 1–3). He has led major international research projects such as MOBIO, TABULA RASA, and BEAT, and serves as Director of the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing.