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Typing a password into your smartphone might be a reasonable way to access the sensitive information it holds, but a startup called EyeVerify thinks it would be easier—and more secure—to just look into the phone’s camera lens and move your eyes to the side.

EyeVerify’s software identifies you by your “eyeprints,” the pattern of veins in the whites of your eyes. Everybody has four eyeprints, two in each eye on either side of the iris. The company claims that its method is as accurate as a fingerprint or iris scan, without requiring any special hardware

Rush says the software can tell the difference between a real person and an image of a person. It randomly challenges the smartphone’s camera to adjust settings such as focus, exposure, and white balance and checks whether it receives an appropriate response from the object it’s focused on.

“I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current [computer] interface.

“We’re at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront,

Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT who has been working on speech interfaces since the 1980s, says today’s smart phones pack as much processing power as the laboratory machines he worked with in the ’90s. Smart phones also have high-bandwidth data connections to the cloud, where servers can do the heavy lifting involved with both voice recognition and understanding spoken queries. “The combination of more data and more computing power means you can do things today that you just couldn’t do before,” says Glass. “You can use more sophisticated statistical models.”

Tech in the Classroom is a recurring feature that examines widely available technology, software and gadgets and how they might be used in a school setting. What favorite gadget or tool are you using in the classroom? As this new content area grows, let us know what products you’d like to read about.

Tech in the Classroom: StudySync This is a Web-based supplemental curriculum. Aligned to the Common Core and aimed at middle-school and high-school students, StudySync enlists broadcast-quality video, digital media, mobile platforms and social learning to advance reading, writing and critical thinking

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it is important to bring attention to all the ways math is relevant to everyday life