Amerman, who had recently moved in with Ferrell, eventually joined the class after attending one of Bourlai’s lectures while he waited for Ferrell to get out of class. Amerman, a senior from North Berwick, Maine, said Bourlai had him hooked in that short hour.
“I went home and immediately registered,” he said.
Over the course of the semester, Amerman and Ferrell impressed Bourlai, who promised them jobs in the school’s multi-spectral imaging lab if they passed his class.
“He told us, ‘I?ll give you a job if you get an A,’” said Ferrell, a junior from Elkview in Kanawha County.
Little did they know Bourlai had been recruiting them for some time to help him create the software he came up with years earlier.
Working odd jobs for cash at the time, Amerman and Ferrell happily accepted the offer and got the needed grade, not knowing exactly what Bourlai had in mind. Soon after, a chance encounter in an elevator led to the addition of Dunn, a senior from Scott Depot in Putnam County.
With the three students on board, Bourlai pitched the idea for a project that utilized biometric scanning, which Dunn, Amerman and Ferrell admit they knew nothing about. Out of necessity, they quickly figured things out though, because Bourlai gave them a major project and very little time to complete it.
The project was to create the first iteration of the Secure Selfie application so it could be demoed for investors.
“He came to us and said, ‘You have a week to finish this,” Ferrell said.
A difficult task even for an expert in biometric programming, the three students said they worked for what seemed like a week straight.
Dunn said they wrote 1,500 lines of code, which he indicated was a lot for the type of demo they did. It took 150 total hours of work to complete, he added.
They each took on tasks that favored their area of expertise. Amerman programmed, Dunn coded algorithms and Ferrell kept the server built on his computer functioning properly.
Investors were impressed with the demo, Dunn said.
The team has made several versions since then and hope to have the application out to market in the near future. Ferrell said the application’s name was influenced by several instances of celebrity photos being spread across the Internet after their phones were hacked.
Bourlai added that mobile security is a major concern for many and that there already is a market for applications like Secure Selfies.
“When more biometric safeguards are built into a phone, it is more difficult to hack,” he said, though he added it can also complicate the user experience.
“You probably don’t want to scan your fingerprint, face and all these other things just to use your phone,” he said. “But, if you’re a banker, you may want that extra security.” That’s why the team is looking at creating security tiers with multiple modes of authentication.
While Secure Selfies is the property and brand of Confirmix, the technology it uses is owned and licensed by WVU.