[2][3][4][5][6][7] The son of émigrés Josef Petros Daugmanis from Latvia and Runa Inge Olsson from Sweden, John Daugman was educated in America, receiving an A.B.
[citation needed] Following his PhD, Daugman held a post-doctoral fellowship, then taught at Harvard for five years.
His algorithm automatically recognizes persons in real-time by encoding the random patterns visible in the iris of the eye from some distance, and applying a powerful test of statistical independence.
It is used in many identification applications such as the Unique IDentification Authority of India (UIDAI) for registering all 1.3 billion citizens of India for government services and entitlements, border crossing controls in United Arab Emirates and passport-free immigration in the UK, the Netherlands, United States, Canada, and other countries.
This is encoded into a very compact bit stream, the IrisCode, that is stored in a database for identification at search speeds of millions of iris patterns per second per single CPU core.