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If you cross borders — for work, for holidays, to visit family — the technology EINSTEIN is developing will affect your experience. Our applications include fast-track lanes that let pre-enrolled frequent travellers pass through face and iris verification on the move, pre-registration systems that move border processing upstream so you spend less time waiting, and quality tools that help you submit a compliant passport photograph the first time without needing specialist knowledge.

But we also recognise that biometric technology at borders raises real questions that citizens are entitled to ask. Who holds your data? How long is it kept? Can you opt out? What happens if the system gets it wrong? These are not inconvenient complications — they are the questions that determine whether this technology is trustworthy and legitimate. EINSTEIN takes them seriously. Our ethics and legal partner, Trilateral Research, conducts independent impact assessments of every application, and privacy-by-design is built into our systems from the outset, not added afterwards.

By joining our network as a citizen or traveller, you will receive our newsletter — plain-language updates on what the project is finding and building — and you will have the opportunity to share your perspective. Your voice matters to us.

Border guards, document examiners, immigration officers, and law enforcement professionals are the intended end-users of EINSTEIN's applications. Several are already partners in the project — the UK Home Office, Hellenic Police, Bulgarian Border Police, and Royal Netherlands Marechaussee are all working directly with the consortium. Their operational knowledge shapes every design decision we make.

If your organisation is not yet connected to EINSTEIN, joining the network means you will receive early access to our results, invitations to field test observations and practitioner workshops, and the opportunity to feed your operational requirements into the research process while there is still time to act on them. The project ends in December 2026, but the tools, datasets, and standards contributions will remain available long after.

The regulatory landscape for biometric border security is changing rapidly. The EU AI Act classifies biometric identification systems used in border management as high-risk AI, with obligations that apply from August 2026. eIDAS 2.0 is reshaping digital identity infrastructure across Europe. The Entry/Exit System is rolling out. ISO/IEC standards for face image quality, morphing attack detection, and biometric corridor specifications are being revised — with EINSTEIN consortium members contributing directly.

If you work on any of these policy areas — at national, EU, or international level — EINSTEIN's research findings, evaluation results, and policy recommendations are directly relevant to your work. We welcome officials from ministries of interior, justice, foreign affairs, and digital affairs, as well as national data protection authorities, parliamentary committees, and EU agencies including Frontex and eu-LISA, with whom the project has established formal working relationships.

EINSTEIN's results are designed to be deployable. Our open-source tools — including OFIQ (Open Face Image Quality), now adopted in operational identity systems across Europe, and the ENCHANTER dataset preparation framework — are freely available for integration into commercial products. Our evaluation results on the BOEP, NIST FATE-MORPH, and NIST SIDD platforms establish benchmarks against which vendors can compare their systems.

Technology companies developing biometric systems, identity verification platforms, document authentication tools, or border management infrastructure will find EINSTEIN's research directly relevant — whether you are an established vendor, a start-up, or an integrator looking to understand where the field is heading next.

Airports, seaports, rail terminals, and land border crossing points are where EINSTEIN's technology meets the real world. Infrastructure operators — from major international hub airports to ferry port operators managing seasonal passenger surges — face a distinctive set of challenges that sit at the intersection of security, throughput, passenger experience, and cost.

EINSTEIN's applications have been developed and tested in exactly these environments. The Fast Track Corridor has undergone field trials at a UK port of entry. The Land Border Pre-Registration application has been tested at the Promachonas-Kulata crossing on the Greece-Bulgaria border. The Smart EES Kiosk application is designed specifically for the self-service infrastructure that ports and airports are deploying to manage Entry/Exit System registration.

For infrastructure operators, the questions that matter are practical: What does this technology require in terms of physical space, power, connectivity, and maintenance? How does it integrate with existing access control and passenger management systems? What happens when it fails, and how is the passenger flow disruption managed? How do you communicate the technology to passengers in a way that builds trust rather than anxiety? Joining the EINSTEIN stakeholder network means your operational perspective can inform the research while there is still time to act on it.

EINSTEIN publishes openly. All of our peer-reviewed papers are freely available through our Zenodo community. We actively contribute to ISO/IEC standardisation, the EAB Research Projects Conference, and BIOSIG — the leading European biometrics research conference.

We also recognise that the deployment of AI-driven biometric systems at borders is not a politically neutral question. Civil society organisations, researchers in law, ethics, social science, and human rights, and journalists covering surveillance and digital rights all play an important role in ensuring that technologies like those developed in EINSTEIN are subject to proper democratic scrutiny. We welcome their engagement and are committed to transparency about what we are building and why.