BEIJING–At Tsinghua University here, researchers have devised an application that allows security cameras to identify individuals. It’s currently used to expedite the border-crossing process between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Hewlett-Packard is now trying to bring the application to consumer PCs for searching video files. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant is opening a lab at Tsinghua, China’s premier technological university. The facility, HP’s first full-fledged lab built at a university, will initially focus on pattern matching and searching technologies for audio tracks, videos or photos. Ideally, the collaboration will result in applications for HP computers that will better wed its printer business to PCs or let HP offer capabilities that competitors won’t have. “There is definitely a need for this. Printing is about context. There is nothing to print if you can’t find what you are looking for,” said Patrick Scaglia, chief technology officer of imaging and printing systems at HP. One set of applications from Tsinghua, for instance, can find songs in a music library by their rhythm characteristics, genre or vocal track. Type in “classical” on a genre search, and the software ferrets out the symphonic pieces on a hard drive through the sound in the track, not…