AI researchers can now identify people by eye movements

Our eyes wander as we read text, and not just in the figurative sense -- between a series of rapid motions called saccades, eyes remain still for just 200-300 milliseconds on average. Those movements are rich with subtext -- they're driven by cognitive processes involving vision, attention, language, and motor control -- and according to new research from the University of Potsdam, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy, they're enough to identify a person pretty accurately. A paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org "Identification based on eye movements during reading may offer several advantages in many application areas," the researchers wrote. "Users can be identified unobtrusively while having access to a document they would read anyway, which saves time and attention."