List of Keynote Speakers
- Multimedia Information Security: An Overview of Research and Challenges Philip Chen
- Alan Turing, spam e-mail, pattern recognition: an intriguing triangle Fabio Roli



Multimedia Information Security: An Overview of Research and Challenges
Speaker: C. L. Philip Chen, Ph.D., F.IEEE
Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Texas, San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A
Abstract: Digital multimedia content, can be created, edited, distributed, shared, and stored with convenience at a very low cost over the mobile and ad hoc nature of today's various networks. As a result, multimedia security and digital authentication, transmission and detection of sensitive information via communication systems have become a very important research subject recently. Encryption and data hiding are two most popular areas in multimedia security research. This talk will focus on data hiding techniques, especially, steganography techniques.

Steganography is the hiding of a message within another message so that the presence of the hidden message is indiscernible. Practically, it is the art of secret communication. Digital data can be hidden in pictures, videos, music, text, binary files, or source code. The key concept behind steganography is that the message to be transmitted is not visible to the informal eye or ears. In fact, people who are not intended to be the recipients of the message should not even suspect that a hidden message exists. After September 11, steganography has received enormous attention in industry and in academia. Recently USA Today reported that Bin Laden was using information hiding to disguise his communications.

One the hand, the purpose of steganalysis is to discover the presence of hidden messages in digital media. Steganography and steganalysis have not been completely examined in detail by the scientific community outside the military. It is a relatively new and fast growing field. Over 90% of all the open publications have appeared in the past seven years. This area now has become a multimillion-dollar research market, and closely related to the security of our nation.
In this talk, we summarize stegano research accomplishments during the past few years and propose a number of directions for future research.




Note: The presented work is based on the result from Dr. Sos Agaian and Dr. Philip Chen funded by Center of Information Assurance and Security, U.S. the Air Force Information Warfare Center.
Biography: C. L. Philip Chen received his M.S. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. in 1985, and his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A., in 1988, both degrees in Electrical Engineering. Currently, he is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He also has been the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies of the College of Engineering.

Dr. Chen has been a visiting research scientist at the Materials Directorate, U.S. Air Force Wright Lab. He has been a senior research fellow sponsored by the U.S. National Research Council and a research faculty fellow for NASA Glenn Research Center for several years. His current research interests include theoretical development in computational intelligence, intelligent systems, robotics and manufacturing automation, networking, diagnosis and prognosis, life prediction and life-extending control. He is an elected IEEE Fellow.

Dr. Chen has been active in many IEEE international conference services and publications as a Program Chair, an Organizing Committee member, and an IEEE ABET evaluator. He will be the General Chair of the 2009 IEEE SMC annual conference. Currently, he is the Vice President on Technical Activities in Systems Science and Engineering. He has been a member of IEEE SMC Board of Governors and Treasurer for IEEE SMC Society. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on SMC-C and IEEE Systems Journal. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu honor societies. Dr. Chen is the founding faculty advisor of IEEE Computer society student chapter and faculty advisor of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society at the University of Texas at San Antonio.


Alan Turing, spam e-mail, pattern recognition: an intriguing triangle
Speaker: Professor Fabio Roli
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Cagliari, Italy
Abstract: What is the connection between Alan Turing, the famous pioneer of computer science, spam e-mail, and computer pattern recognition? I open my talk with this apparently philosophical question, and use it as a thread to discuss the challenges that computer security is foisting on pattern recognition, and to introduce the intriguing research field of adversarial pattern recognition, where a malicious adversary takes actions to evade a classifier. First, I show the connection between Alan Turing and spam email, by explaining briefly how modified versions of the famous Turing’s test, named Captchas, are used to defend against mail spamming, and how this kind of test for intelligence exploits the known limits of visual pattern recognition by computers. The connection between e-mail spamming and visual pattern recognition allows discussing the challenging task of image spam filtering, what I addressed in my recent works. Then, I introduce the concept of adversarial pattern recognition, which I consider the more general connection between Alan Turing, spam e-mail, and pattern recognition. I present the basic concepts of adversarial pattern recognition and discuss the use of multiple classifier systems to “harden?a pattern recognition system, so that it becomes more difficult to evade it.
Biography: Fabio Roli received his M.S. degree, with honors, and Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genoa, Italy. He was a member of the research group on Image Processing and Understanding of the Dept. of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Genoa, Italy, from 1988 to 1994. He was adjunct professor at the University of Trento, Italy, in 1993 and 1994. In 1995, he joined the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Cagliari, Italy, where he is now professor of computer engineering and head of the research group on pattern recognition and applications. He is the Director of the Laboratory on Ambient Intelligence of the Science&Technology Park in Sardinia, Italy, and member of the scientific board of the joint research laboratories between Tiscali company and the Univ. of Cagliari. Prof. Roli’s current research activity is focused on multiple classifier systems and their applications to biometric personal identification, multimedia text categorization, and computer security. On such topics, he has published more than one hundred papers at conferences and on journals and has given lectures and tutorials. Prof. Roli has organised and co-chaired the seven editions of the International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems. He is member of the IEEE and Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, editor of the Journal of Advances in Information Fusion, associate editor of the Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition Letters, Pattern Analysis and Applications journal, and member of the editorial Board of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence. Prof. Roli is the chairman of the IAPR Technical Committee on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition and member of the Executive Board of the International Computational Intelligence Society.