Prof. Anthony T.S. Ho

Bensted Lecture Title 1

The application of Natural Laws for detecting malicious attacks in natural, biometric and network data

Wednesday, July 6, 2016 @ 14:00 - 15:00 p.m.
Applied Science Bldg., Room 9705

Abstract 1

The areas of biometrics and digital forensics have recently attracted much attention from the research community. Both research areas are becoming more and more integrated, stemming from security concerns due to intentional/malicious tampering of raw biometric samples. These malicious attacks could have a significant impact to the integrity of digital evidence being presented in criminal cases in the court of law. In recent years, the use of natural laws such as the Benford’s law, which is also known as the first digit law, has been shown to be very effective in detecting anomalies in biometric data. In this talk, the use of natural laws for the detection of malicious attacks in different biometric applications will be presented, which will include fingerprint identification, face recognition, keystroke data and network traffic flow.

Bensted Lecture Title 2

An introduction to Secret Communication, Active Watermarks and Passive Forensics

Friday, July 8, 2016 @ 14:00 - 15:00 p.m.
IRMACS Auditorium 10900

Abstract 2

The tremendous growth of advanced telecommunication and Internet technologies in the past two decades has led to the proliferation of multimedia content for digital transmission and storage. The talk will give an overview of the convergence of technologies in the information forensics and security domain such as data hiding techniques and their applications to digital images. For example, image steganography for secure communication of secret messages via an open channel, and digital watermarking for protection and authentication of content integrity. Finally, the talk will also introduce forensic techniques for identification and forgery detection of and videos.

Biography

Professor Anthony (Tony) T.S. Ho holds a Personal Chair in Multimedia Security and served as Head of Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey from 2010 to 2015. He is a Guest Professor of Wuhan University of Technology, China. Tony was the recipient of the prestigious Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Innovation in Engineering Award under the Security category for his research and commercialization work on digital watermarking in 2006.

Tony obtained his BSc (Hons) in Physical Electronics from Northumbria University in 1979, his MSc in Applied Optics from Imperial College London in 1980 and his PhD in Digital Image Processing from King's College London, University of London in 1983. After graduation, he worked in technical management positions in industry for 11 years in the UK and Canada. From 1994 to 2005, Tony was a Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He has published more than 140 articles in international journals and conference proceedings as well as 8 international patents granted related to watermarking and steganography.

Tony is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA) and an Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). He also served as Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL) and
EURASIP Journal of Image and Video Processing. He was invited keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Information Technology Convergence (ISITC’2015), 1st ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IHMMSec'2013) and IEEE International Conference on Advanced Infocomm Technology (ICAIT’2010). He has also been invited to present a keynote speech at the upcoming 10th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS’2016) in September 2016 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Currently Tony serves as Section Secretary on the Executive Committee of IEEE UK and Ireland Section and has served as members of a number of IEEE Technical Committees, including Signal Processing Society (SPS) IFS-TC, Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) MSA-TC and VSPC-TC. Tony is a Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), Fellow of Institute of Physics (FInstP), Fellow of British Computer Society (FBCS) and Senior Member of IEEE.

Prof. Alain Trouvé

Bensted Lecture Title

Riemannian Shape Spaces, Diffeomorphisms & Computational Anatomy: A walk in high dimensions

Friday, July 12, 2012 @ 13:30 - 14:30 p.m.
IRMACS Auditorium 10900

Biography

Professor Alain Trouve is a Professor of Mathematics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Cachan, Paris, France, where he is also the Chair of the department of Mathematics. His research interests are in the areas of Applied Probability, Stochastic Optimization, Pattern Recognition, and Shape Spaces and Deformable Models for Neuroimaging. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of the area of metric spaces in Computational Anatomy.

Prof.Chintha Tellambura

Bensted Lecture Title

Precoder design and power control using convex and non-convex optimization techniques

Thursday, August 16, 2007 @ 14:30 - 15:30 p.m.
Applied Science Bldg., Room 9896

Abstract

Global optimization has provided both an insightful modeling language and a powerful solution tool to the analysis and design of communication systems over the last decade. In this talk, I will present two specific global optimization formulations.

The first part of this talk provides a convex optimization approach to the precoder design problem in MIMO systems employing Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBCs). A general precoder design framework is developed for OSTBC-based MIMO wireless systems to exploit the partial channel state information (CSI) on both transmits and receive correlations. The precoder is designed for minimizing the exact symbol error rate (SER) and is formulated as a convex optimization problem that can be efficiently solved using modern optimization techniques. Our proposed design is applicable for various antennas configurations and modulation constellations. Moreover, we show that for some particular correlation models, computationally simple closed-form precoders can be developed.

Convex optimization in communications systems has long been an active research area. However, nonconvex optimization problems usually arise naturally when formulating real-world problems.

The second part of this talk presents a new approach to nonconvex optimization problems. One of such problems is the power control problem in wireless networks in order to optimize the transmission subject to quality of service (QoS) constraints. It has been shown earlier that the power control problem in the wireless cellular network framework can be efficiently solved using the so-called geometric programming. However, in order to enable the application of geometric programming the signal to interference ratio (SIR) has been considered instead of SINR. Such change of the original problem formulation is obviously imprecise and might be very loose because it does not take into account the noise component, especially for low SNR operation. In this work, we show that the power control problem for wireless cellular systems can be efficiently solved via the so-called difference of two convex functions (D.C.) programming.

Biography

Chintha Tellambura received his PhD in Electronics Engineering in 1993 from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. From 2002, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, where he is a Professor. His research interests include MIMO, OFDM, and wireless communication theory, and he has published about 100 refereed journal papers.

Prof. P.Y. Kam

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
National University of Singapore
Singapore

Bensted Lecture Title

Frequency Estimation and its Applications in Wireless Communications

Research Interests

• Communication theory
• Detection and estimation
• Signal processing
• Stochastic processes

Prof. Pooi Yuen Kam was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, in 1951, and received the B.S, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1972, 1973, and 1976, respectively, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. From 1976 to 1978, he was a Member of the Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, where he was engaged in packet network studies. Since 1978, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, where he is now a Professor. His research interests are in detection and estimation theory, and its applications to digital communications and coding. Since 1996, he has been the Editor for Modulation and Detection for Wireless Systems of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He won the Best Paper Award at IEEE VTC 2004 Fall.

Prof. Ross D. Murch

Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Clearwater Bay
Hong Kong

Bensted Lecture Title

Cross-Layer Optimization for Multiuser MIMO Wireless Communications

Research Interests

• Wireless communication systems
• MIMO antenna systems
• UWB, WLAN
• Cross-layer design

Professor Murch completed his PhD in 1990 in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Since 1992, he has been with HKUST. He has research interests in wireless communication systems including high speed wireless communication using MIMO signal processing and novel antenna technology. He has several US patents related to wireless communication, over 150 published papers and acts as a consultant for industry. In addition he is an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and was also the technical program chair of the Advanced Wireless Communication Systems Symposium at the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Communication in New York. He is also the founding Director of the Center for Wireless Information Technology which was begun in August 1997.

Dr. Peter Smith

Associate Professor
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Canterbury
Christchurch
New Zealand

Bensted Lecture Title

MIMO channel models in space, time and polarization: How complex should they be?

Research Interests

• Statistical design and analysis of communication systems
• Digital mobile radio systems
• Antenna arrays
• Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems
• Simulation