Trustworthy Human Authentication in the Age of Generative AI

Speaker: Ajay Kumar, Associate Head (Research) and Professor, Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Date: 27 July 2026

The rapid advancement of generative AI and large language models has reshaped the cybersecurity landscape, enabling both powerful defense mechanisms and sophisticated cyber-attacks such as social engineering, malware generation, fake news, and autonomous hacking agents. These emerging threats highlight the urgent need for trustworthy, user-friendly, and robust human authentication across mobile identity, fintech, e-payments, healthcare, and public services. In his talk, Ajay Kumar emphasised the urgent need for trustworthy, user-friendly, and robust human authentication across mobile identity, fintech, e-payments, healthcare, and public services given the challenges of sophisticated cyber-attacks such as social engineering, malware generation, fake news, and autonomous hacking agents. He discussed how biometric recognition can address these challenges and reviewed modern approaches and recent progress in contactless and hand-based authentication on mobile devices, emphasising their potential for secure, convenient, and scalable identity verification.