Keynote Speakers

An Information-Theoretical Approach Toward SRAM-PUF Authentication

Prof. Dr. Ir. Frans Willems

Frans M.J. Willems was born in Stein, The Netherlands, in 1954. He received the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and the Ph.D. degree from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 1979 and 1982 respectively.
From 1979 to 1982 he was a research assistant at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In 1982 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, where he is a full professor now. His research contributions are in the areas of multi-user information theory, noiseless source coding, data-embedding, and biometrics. From 1999 - 2016 he was an advisor for Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, for subjects related to information theory.
Dr. Willems received the Marconi Young Scientist Award in 1982. From 1988 to 1990, he served as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. From 2002 to 2006 he was Associate Editor for Information Theory for the European Transactions on Telecommunications.
He is co-recipient of the 1996 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award for a paper in which the Context-Tree Weighting Algorithm was proposed. From 1998 to 2000 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Since 2005 Dr. Willems is an IEEE Fellow. He was Counselor of the IEEE Student Branch Eindhoven from 2007 to 2014, and was Chairman of the IEEE Benelux Chapter on Information Theory from 2007 to 2017. More recently Dr. Willems received a 2011 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the paper ”Biometric Systems: Privacy and Security Aspects.” In 2014 - 2015 Dr. Willems was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Dr. Willems has contributed more than two hundred journal and conference papers. He holds several patents.

Face Perception by the Human Visual System

Over the past 20 years, advances in signal processing have substantially improved theory and practice of face recognition, with many applications including security and privacy. However, recent developments, such as adversarial examples and hyper-realistic fake faces, reveal the limitations of known methods and expose a persisting gap between how humans and machines perceive faces. 

Human visual perception results from a complex chain of processes, starting with the spatial frequency- and orientation-selective encoding of luminance in the primary visual cortex (V1). More anterior high-level regions have increasingly larger receptive field and specialize for increasingly more complex shape properties. Some of these high-level regions specialize for given visual categories such as faces or natural scenes. We know very little about how such high-level specialization builds upon primary encoding stages in V1.

Our work combines multiple investigation techniques: psychophysics, electrophysiology (scalp EEG, ERP and steady-state), as well as neuroimaging (of V1 and high-level visual regions) and suggests that the specialization of face processing, though emerging at high-level stages of visual processing, roots into the processing of selective ranges of the primary orientation and SF information.

Valérie Goffaux

Since 2013, Valerie Goffaux is leading the human visual neuroscience lab at UCLouvain (Belgium). By means of psychophysics, neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods, her research aims at understanding how the human brain solves the complex task of face perception. 

She completed her PhD at UCLouvain (Belgium) under the supervision of Prof. Raymond Bruyer, and postdoctoral fellowships at UCLouvain with Prof. Rossion, at Maastricht University with Prof. Goebel, at the University of Luxembourg with Prof. Schiltz, and at the KULeuven (Belgium) with Prof. Op de Beeck.