Background:
Industry-wide retail fraud and theft amount to almost $36 BILLION in losses per year in the U.S. alone[1]. No industry is immune, ranging from the large retail stores, shopping malls, and outlets, to thrift stores, and even the local "mom and pop" corner grocery store. If those engaged in shoplifting activities could be identified and successfully tracked through the actual shoplifting event until interdiction, these losses would be substantially reduced and the economic health of the nation would be dramatically improved.
NIST is coordinating this technical symposium to assist Industry in addressing this significant problem through a multidiscipinary roadmapping and collaborative approach to future R&D and in providing the necessary metrology and research infrastructure to accelerate the R&D. As such, the symposium will bring together stakeholders to discuss current state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies used to detect behavioral indicators of persons engaged in shoplifting activities, and create a collaborative road map for advancing the state-of-the-art in critical technologies necessary to confront this problem. To further these ends, a symposium will be held June 29 and 30, 2010 at NIST Headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD, comprised of Industry, Academia, Law Enforcement, and interested government agencies.
The symposium will include representation from four critical sectors relating to the challenge of creating effective technologies to detect retail theft: the retail industry – especially those organizations focused on video-based retail theft detection methodologies, 2) law enforcement, 3) the security technologies industry, and 4) researchers working in the area of computer vision technologies for video surveillance. Discussions from each sector will conclude with interactive brainstorming aimed at road-mapping the current state of knowledge, required capabilities, and recognized gaps. A distribution of the proceedings, including presentations and an edited roadmap, is planned.
Topics:
Submission of brief (1/2 page) presentation abstracts are invited on topics in any aspect of behavior detection and tracking, including but not limited to:
Submissions:
Interested participants should send a brief ½ page the presentation abstract to retailsecurity_poc [at] nist.gov (retailsecurity_poc[at]nist[dot]gov) no later than Friday, April 30, 2010. Please include name, affiliation, address, phone number and email address. Attendance at the symposium will be limited to about 100 participants.
Information for Symposium Attendees:
Registration and accommodation information can be found at the following link: http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/retailsecurity2010-symposium.cfm
Symposium Agenda:
The program agenda is now available.
For More Information:
For additional information, please send email to retailsecurity_poc [at] nist.gov (retailsecurity_poc[at]nist[dot]gov). If you would like to join the general Retail Security mailing list hosted by NIST, retailsecurity_list [at] nist.gov (retailsecurity_list[at]nist[dot]gov), send an e-mail to listproc [at] nist.gov (listproc[at]nist[dot]gov); put "subscribe retailsecurity_list" in the body.
[1] National Retail Security Survey, 2008.