typing recognition.

One of my research projects ( which is more web than ubicomp) is the development of an on-line compiler for students. One of the problems we have is 'knowing' the student is the one who did the work and the one who turns up for the exam.

For a while I've been wondering about something which looks at mouse and keyboard timing to 'recognise' you. The idea is if you look at the timing of key downs and the inter-key timing for typing on a keyboard it might tell you 2 things
    1. let you discriminate you from someone else and
    2. let you get some inkling about that persons emotional state  ( something for affective computing).

This work on passwords suggests someone has made a full time career out of that idea ( which is great). They want to build a password system without passwords - nice and very user friendly. Eventually they will realise you can have a system which identifies people by their clicking so giving an 'online' identity. This stops someone being kicked out of a forum for abusive behaviour then coming back as someone else ( or  logging on multiple times as different people).

Going back to students for a second - the ability to recognise a student typing code would be a boon. In an exam they have to prove who they are so if we can capture their ID for the exercises then we can check that on line students are who they say they are.