Meeting Minutes

IFS-TC Meeting Minutes: 8 June 2023

8 June 2023: Meeting minutes

 

IFS-TC Meeting ICASSP 2020

May 13th 2020, 12:00 UTC+1

 

Present (14 members)

1. Anderson Rocha

2. Rafael Schaefer

3. Pedro Comesãna

4. Chang-Tsun Li

5. Adi-Hajj Ahmad

6. Gianni Poggi

7. Annalisa Verdoliva

8. Benedetta Tondi

9. Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis

10. Alessandro Piva

11. Pawel Korus

12. Stefan Katzenbeisser

13. Zecheria Erkin

14. Simone Milani (Remote)

15. Giulia Boato (Remote)

16. Pedro Comesana (Remote)

17. Tiziano Bianchi

18. Irene Amerini

19. William Puech

20. Victor Sanchez

21. Xiangui Kang

22. Samson Cheung

23. Remi Cogranne

24. Riccardo Lazzeretti

25. Tulay Adali (SPS Invitee)
     

Agenda

1. 2020 WIFS updates 

• Updates on WIFS 2020 Organization

1. https://www.wifs2020.nyu.edu/CFP
2. CFP is ready https://www.wifs2020.nyu.edu/submissions
    

2. 2020 ICASSP report

• A big thanks to 2020 ICASSP Area Chairs
  • William Puech
  • Rafael Schaefer
  • Benedetta Tondi
  • Remi Cogranne
  • Victor Sanchez
  • Beibei Wang
     

3. 2020 ICIP report

• We had some problems with ICIP 2020 EDICS
• EDICS from the TC were not present
• We could see some related ones but not really the ones linked to this TC. See below

[TEC-MLI] Machine Learning for Image and Video Processing	194
[COM-WSE] Image & Video Processing for Watermarking and Security	26
[ARS-IIU] Image & Video Interpretation and Understanding	63
[ARS-BIM] Image & Video Biometric Analysis	30
[ELI-DOC] Scanned Document Analysis, Processing, and Coding	4
[MLR-APPL] Machine Learning in Electronic Imaging and DocumentProcessing	5

• We need to make sure that ALL events follow the standardized EDICS from SPS.
   

4. Possible discussion for WIFS 2020 organized remotely, if needed

• In case we need, it's important to discuss the possibility of moving 2020 WIFS to aremote event
• In that case, please see below notes taken by Pawel Korus (one of the organizers).
   

5. 2021 WIFS Proposal

• We are open to proposals for 2021 WIFS organization
• If anyone is willing to organize it, let us know.
   

6. 2020 IEEE SPS Awards (Subcoms)

• We need to have TC nominations this year

• Due to the difficult task of scanning through several papers linked to the TC, weexpanded the Award Subcommittee to consider the following members:

  • Gianni Poggi,

  • Paolo Bestagini,

  • Jiankun Hu,

  • Bin Li ,

  • Aris Divanis,

  • Chang-Tsun,

  • Patrick Bas,

  • Tiziano Bianchi
     

7. DL/IDL suggestions

• The TC will nominate one person in 2020 for DL. No nomination was received for IDL.
   

8. IFS-TC Review Meeting

• The TC will be evaluated this year by SPS

• Update: the evaluation already happened and it went fine. A final report will be sent tothe TC members as soon as SPS send back its feedbacks and recommendations.

   

9. Diversity

• What can we do to engage more members from the industry and from minorities?
• Should we reserve spots? The TC believes it's better to actively search for candidates first rather than reserving
• We would like to especially engage young professionals and members from industry more.
• We have now updated the TC Affiliate forms and affiliates who register on the webpage are providing more detailed information. Also, we have been promoting this as an easy way for IEEE non-members to get involved with TCs widely
• Perhaps we could ask all candidates to prepare a 1-minutedvideo introducing themselves.
• Actively search for members in emerging areas in Forensics and Security such asc ryptocurrencies, forensics in social media, deep fakes, etc.

 

 

WIFS 2020 - General Conference Notes by Pawel Korus

• Good idea: spread conference over a few days - there may be a short time-slot whichis acceptable for several time zones
  https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20201207&p1=179&p2=215&p3=1232&p4=22
• Breakout rooms - can use either built-in Zoom features or some other ad-hoc channels(Slack may have group call functions too)
• Issue with EDICS at ICIP --> Ask Anderson for up-to date EDICS for use in WIFS
• Good idea: Problems from the industry - Ask for short papers (1 page?) from industryto describe their main problems and gaps in the academic research
• Chats / engagement beyond WIFS
  • Current IFS website too basic
  • Can we have a separate Website to build engagement and share content
  • For example, can share tutorials a few weeks after the conference

 

WIFS Tutorials ideas

• Adversarial attacks and learning
• Privacy in distributed learned
• Differential privacy
• Synthetic content generation and detection
• GANsSocial media forensics

 

Other notes

• Website / community for the IFS
• How to engage more experts from the industry?

 

IFS-TC Meeting WIFS 2019

Dec 11th 2019, 12:00 UTC+1

 

Present (14 members)

1. Anderson Rocha

2. Giani Poggi

3. Benedetta Tondi

4. Rafael Schaefer

5. Jiankun Hu

6. Patrizio Campisi

7. Tiziano Bianchi

8. Paolo Bestagini

9. Remi Cogranne

10. Annalisa Verdoliva

11. Zecheria Erkin

12. Simone Milani (Remote)

13. Giulia Boato (Remote)

14. Pedro Comesana (Remote)

Agenda

1. 2019 WIFS Report 

• We received a 5k SPS Grant for student travel this year.
• WIFS has attracted about 90 registered people and had 104 valid submissions with a 30% acceptance ratio. There was one special session.
• Due to an excellent job of the program chairs, we also attracted 16 presentations from authors in WIFS-related journals such as the IEEE T-IFS. This was possible due to direct person-to-person contacts of the chair Annalisa.
• Suggestion for 2020: using remaining funds for 2020’s student travel grants fund.
• WIFS organizers: please proceed with the archival of the website. Contact Remi for this.
• How to increase attendance and submissions for WIFS (possible actions)?

1. Co-organize with some big event?
2. WIFS is related to security and forensics. Normally we satisfy one session per subject basically. What’s the stimuli to attend WIFS? We should specialize?
3. We are not growing in terms of researchers, students.
4. How to be more appealing?
5. Suggestion #1: Organize more special sessions or special day? Deepfakes, presentation attacks, social media forensics/fake news
6. Suggestion #2: The IFS-TC should behave more as a community. Find special sessions, find chairs, tutorials, keynote speakers. Everyone could try to bring one industrial partner to the event. How to motivate TC members to be more active.
7. Suggestion #3: Consider having challenges.
8. Suggestion #4 (already done successfully this year): Try to contact TIFS authors to come and present their work.
9. Suggestion #5: Perhaps increase acceptance rate of WIFS to about 40% if quality of papers allow.

• How many submissions in T-IFS?

2. 2019 IFS nomination

• Nomination process for 2019 had 16 people.
• Nine were selected.
• We should seek to increase the number of nominations and members for the 2020 selection process.
• Check with the nominees if they are really sure about taking such responsibilities
• Push TC members to participate in the voting process. We have a 20% miss rate this year.

3. Improve TC activities

• Better define the subcommittees assignments and associate roles
• Perhaps establishing a group task force in terms of advertising, collect names of people working in the area, partnerships, industry players.
• Perhaps establishing some time-to-time conf calls with TC members / subcommittee members for planing.

4. 2020 WIFS Venue

• New York proposal
• Help with advertisement

5. 2021 WIFS Proposal

• We need to look around already for a possible 2021 proposal. Any preference for location?

6. 2020 ICASSP Report

• We have obtained 98 submissions in the TC
• 5 area chairs
• Reviews due Dec. 16th, 2019.

IFS-TC Meeting ICIP 2019

Sep 24th 2019, 00:00 GMT (08:00 AM Taipei)

 

Present (14 members)

1. Anderson Rocha
2. Paolo Bestagini
3. William Puech
4. Chang-Tsun Li
5. Simone Milani
6. Patrizio Campisi
7. Aris Divanis

Agenda

1. 2019 WIFS Report 

2. 2020 WIFS Venue 

3. 2019 WIFS Travel Grant Request (5k)

4. 2019 WIFS Challenge Grant Request -- Remi Cogranne (3k) 

5. IFS-TC Subcommittees 

6. 2021 WIFS Proposal 

7. WIFS Best paper invited to T-IFS

1. 2019 WIFS Report 

31 accept papers -- 3 still conditional
103 submissions
Just below 30% acceptance rate.
List of accepted papers is on the WIFS website.

2. 2020 WIFS Venue 

New York City 
Ideas to improve submissions? 
Encourage challenges? 
How to attract sponsors? 

3. 2019 WIFS Travel Grant Request (5k) 

Zeki and I submitted a 5k grant request to SPS this Monday 
Discuss possible surplus with Zeki after WIFS.
Any surplus (on top of the typical 20%) from 2019 could/should be sent to IEEE Foundation in order to encourage travel grants next year's WIFS. 

4. 2019 WIFS Challenge Grant Request -- Remi Cogranne (3k) 

After months of some stalling, we have gotten a 3k travel grant support for WIFS Challenge Remi is coordinating 

5. IFS-TC Subcommittees 

ALL subcoms have been updated

6. 2021 WIFS Proposal 

We should start moving to discuss 2021 WIFS venue. Do you know of any potential organizer interested in taking this task? 
Do we need to make it in Asia? 
We need to come up with a plan for our next TC Meeting at WIFS. 
Two possible bids: one from Montpellier in France (William Puech) and another from Melbourne (Chang-Tsun Li). 

7. WIFS Best paper invited to T-IFS

Try to implement the best paper award for WIFS 
Invite authors to submit their extended version to T-IFS (submissions would be treated normally but if the paper gets accepted, authors could be waived from the extra-page fee). 
Discuss this matter further with Patrizio Campisi and Caroline Johnson 

IFS-TC Meeting ICASSP 2019

May 16th 2019, 11:30-12:30 GMP

 

Present (14 members)

1. Anderson Rocha
2. Patrizio Campisi,
3. Rémi Cogranne
4. Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza
5. Rafael Shaefer
6. Pedro Comesaña
7. Siwei Lyu
8. Stefan Katzenbeisser
9. Paolo Bestagini
10. Simone Milani
11. Benedetta Tondi
12. Jiwu Huang
13. Giulia Boato
14. William Puech

Agenda

1. 2018 WIFS Report

2. 2019 ICASSP Report

3. Plan to attract more submissions for 2019 WIFS

4. EDICS for ICASSP

5. Challenges & Tutorials

6. Special Issue on Multimedia Forensics by IEEE Trans. on Selected Topics

7. IFS-TC Subcommittees

8. 2020 WIFS Proposal

9. 2018 WIFS Report

 

1. 2018 WIFS Report

WIFS 2018 organizers have not finished their report yet. They mention a possible surplus without a full figure. We need to contact them to have this done. Patrizio suggests we transfer ANY surplus to IEEE SPS Foundation so that we can fund student travels and some activities for this year’s WIFS. Patrizio will contact Ajay in order to solve this issue.
The number of submissions for 2018 WIFS kept steady in the ballpark of 108 submitted papers, 35 accepted, 100 attendees. We need to think of some possible ways of improving such numbers.

2. 2019 ICASSP Report

There were 91 submissions under our TC for this year’s ICASSP. This number is way better than last year’s (66) and similar to 2017’s (85).

3. Plan to attract more submissions for 2019 WIFS

The TC suggests some possible forms of improving the WIFS numbers mentioned above such as:

• Promoting WIFS to a conference when possible. People try to focus on the top conferences when submitting good works.

• Perhaps merge with another event in a collocation for a particular year.

• Be more active in pushing people and groups to submit (direct contacts from members of the TC with acquaintances)

• Promoting some adversing videos such as the ones created by Roberto Caldelli some years ago.

• Improving descriptions of what we do and the impacts of what we do (mainly in Social Media)

• Promote more tutorials and challenges to attract students

• Invited (more actively) authors who have published their work on T-IFS to present their papers @WIFS

4. EDICS for ICASSP

We updated the EDICS for ICASSP to be aligned with the one of T-IFS (more mature). This will be valid for next conferences. Here’s the updated list

• ADP ANONYMIZATION AND DATA PRIVACY

• APC APPLIED CRYPTOGRAPHY

• BIO BIOMETRICS

• CIT COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION THEORETIC SECURITY

• CYB CYBERSECURITY

• MMF MULTIMEDIA FORENSICS

• HWS HARDWARE SECURITY

• MMH MULTIMEDIA CONTENT HASH

• NET NETWORK SECURITY

• SUR SURVEILLANCE

• USH USABILITY AND HUMAN FACTORS

• WAT WATERMARKING AND DATA HIDING

• MMH-OTHS FORENSICS & SECURITY RELATED APPLICATIONS

5. Challenges & Tutorials

Paolo Bestagini and Simone Milani are thinking of possible challenges within our TC toengage students. It would be interesting to evaluate such possibilities for 2019 WIFS. They should contact the organizers and see possible actions.

6. Special Issue on Multimedia Forensics by IEEE Trans. on Selected Topics

Nasir Memon is organizing a Special Issue on Multimedia Forensics by IEEE Trans. on Selected Topics along with some other TC members. We should have this under the radar for possible submissions.

7. IFS-TC Subcommittees

Our subcommittees are not very active. We should reorganize their activities and see what can be done to improve promotion of the TC events within such committees.

8. 2020 WIFS Proposal

Our TC needs to start thinking about 2020 WIFS organization. Anyone who is interested in organizing next year’s workshop, please get in touch with me.

That’s all folks! Have a nice ICASSP

 

ICASSP 2015 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Friday April 24, 2015, 13:00-14:30 (GMT+10)

At ICASSP’15, Brisbane, Australia

Minutes prepared by Gwenaël Doërr and Wade Trappe

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members (3): Gwenaël Doërr, Hitoshi Kiya, Wade Trappe

Guests & TC Alumni (4):  Mauro Barni, Jiwu Huang, K. J. Ray Liu, Min Wu

 

 

1. G. Doërr called for the meeting at 13:00 (GMT+10)

 

 

2. Roundtable for introductions

 

G. Doërr indicates that most IFS TC members decided not to attend ICASSP this year due to the distant geographical location of the conference.

 

 

 

3. Society News

 

G. Doërr reports on various initiatives launched at the Society level based on email communications and information gathered during various administrative meetings this week.

 

 

 

SPS is getting increasingly worried about the decreasing participation of non-research members, which cast some doubts about the long-term sustainability of the Society. There is also an increasing feeling of identity loss. To reinforce its visibility, SPS launched a Society-wide initiative to highlight the pervasive use of signal processing techniques in today technologies. The first notable deliverable is an educational video that explains signal processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EErkgr1MWw0. SPS members are encouraged to circulate and showcase it. In the next few months, similar videos will be produced that are more geared towards individual Technical Committees. Min Wu will supervise the production of the video for the IFS TC. Moreover, Nasir Memon has been appointed as the IFS representative to work with the contracted PR firm in charge of developing the SPS Visibility Initiative. In this role, he will (i) share individual stories with communications agency for potential use in campaign, (ii) be available for interviews, (iii) write articles and contribute to digital content upon request (e.g., website articles, video, slideshows), and (iv) share campaign materials/content with own networks (universities, corporations, social networks, etc).

 

 

To better reach out to SPS non-research community, the Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) will soon set in place new editorial guidelines for accessibility. They reinforce the tutorial writing style of the magazine. In particular, they recommend to minimize the use of complicated equations and technical jargons, and instead use appropriate layman's terms, more pictorial means, and illustrative examples. SPM is indeed a de facto benefits for all members of the Society and it is of vital importance that SPM articles are understandable by a non-expert across different fields in signal and information processing, including but not limited to students, industrial practitioners, educators, and researchers. The editorial team of the magazine will also explore how to leverage on popular social platforms to collect feedback from the community. G. Doërr reminds that SPM enjoys a very favorable impact factor and encourage IFS members to consider this publication for tutorial and overview manuscripts. On another front, SPS statistics clearly indicate that most SPS members do not attend SPS conferences. It is thus critical to energize local chapter activity to provide value to these members. To support such networking activities, SPS has created dedicated funding opportunities, especially for events engaging industry members and students.

 

 

To embrace emerging topics, SPS has recently new journal publications: IEEE Transactions on Big Data (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tbd), IEEE Internet of Things Journal (http://iot.ieee.org/journal), IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks (
http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/tsipn/), and IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging (http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/tci/). SPS Technical Directions Board (TDB) is also considering the creation of a Special Interest Group on Computational Photography. SPS recently established links with the newly established IEEE Society on Social Implications in Technology (SSIT http://ieeessit.org/). Alessandro Piva, an alumni of the IFS TC, has been appointed as the SPS Liaison. G. Doërr suggests to IFS members to have a look at these newly created SIGs to identify whether or not there could be opportunities for collaborations for the TC.

 

 

Based on a suggestion of the TDB, SPS Conference Board (CB) agreed to establish an ad-hoc committee to discuss the relationship between GlobalSIP and SPS Technical Committees. The objective is to establish some ground rules to streamline the participation of TC events. Vicky Zhao, one of the co-organizers of WIFS’14 @ GlobalSIP in Atlanta, will participate to the committee to provide feedback on the unique experience of our TC last year. Richard Baseil also give a technical presentation during both TDB and CB meetings to explain how the SPS Conference 20% surplus was actually used and what it would mean to remove it e.g. in an attempt to reduce registration fees. Forecast indicates that reducing conference registration fees (while keeping expenses constant) would mechanically induce lower benefits for SPS members e.g. volunteer travel subsidies e.g. for Distinguished Lecturers, membership subsidies, etc.

 

 

4. IFS TC Review

 

G. Doërr reports that the review of the Technical Committee took place on Monday, April 20 this week. Helen Meng and Rabab Ward were representing the TC Review Committee; M. Wu, W. Trappe, and G. Doërr were representing the IFS TC. The review has been the opportunity to refresh the IFS Policies and Procedures to be aligned with our current practices. H. Meng and R. Ward praised the IFS TC for the quality of its report and most of the time has been dedicated to (i) a discussion about our experience with GlobalSIP in 2014 and (ii) a discussion about our vision of the future of the TC.

 

 

 

Regarding the first point, the Review Committee commended our effort to organize our legacy workshop as part of GlobalSIP and was eager to collect feedback about our experience. We indicated that it has been a mixed experience with a few hurdles along the road and that the expected benefits (lower logistics, walk-in attendance, increased visibility, etc) from the co-hosting was lower than anticipated. Although WIFS’14 has been eventually successful with a lot of good will from both WIFS and GlobalSIP organizers, it seems that the Society needs to establish some ground rules to facilitate such initiatives in the future. In particular, for the organizers, it is critical to recommend good practices on how to manage finances (how to fund TC social events necessary for community building) and publicity (the lack of communication on the conference website infuriated several authors). For attendees, we also recommended to take greater care to avoid overlapping with similar topics in different workshop and to stagger the different keynotes to create a conference path for attendees who are less research oriented. The TC Review Committee indicated the creation of an ad-hoc committee and we mentioned that one of our members will participate to it.

 

 

During the last part of the review, we contemplated several strategies to further consolidate the IFS community. One aspect consisted of embracing (emerging) security-related communities to sustain the growth of the TC. Along this line, we will explore how to establish links with research communities working on physical layer security, Internet of Things Security, privacy-preserving signal processing, signal processing for printed document security signal processing for art authentication, signal processing for crime scene analysis, etc. Another comment was to further reach out to non-research members of the community to naturally nurture the activities of the TC with well-educated students and relevant perspectives about the real-world challenges of the industry. While the IFS TC has a good history of industrial support, it is important to work on widening our footprint beyond our regular watermarking supporters. The TC also indicated that we will place a bid for the SP Cup 2015 and that we will engage in the SPS Visibility Initiative.

 

 

The final feedback from the TC Review Committee will be returned to the TC within a few months.

 

 

5. Conference Activities

 

G. Doërr reports that WIFS’14 books are nearly close. The organizers recently realized that a small glitch occurred when importing the proceedings in IEEExplore with respect to the conference details and will work with the support team to fix this as soon as possible. The organization of WIFS’15 in Rome, Italy is on track. The organizers received four proposals for tutorials and two proposals for special sessions. The regular paper submission is currently on-going and there will be an opportunity to submit demos, on-going work, SPL-TIFS presentations at a later stage. Regarding SPL/TIFS presentations, the organizers will liaise with the Editor in Chief of the two publication in order to directly notify past authors of this opportunity. An Italian team is currently working on shaping up a nice half-day thematic forum on multimedia forensics to complement the regular program. The objective is to involve forensics practitioners (judges, police officers, journalists, etc) to have fruitful exchanges. The IFS TC is also actively working on renewing the Technical Co-sponsorship with the IEEE Biometrics Council (http://ieee-biometrics.org/) in liaison with SPS CB for improved visibility in this research community. All IFS members are invited to provide to Patrizio Campisi the contact details of relevant individuals who may be willing to financially support the workshop. Pedro Comesaña-Alfaro will circulate a call for proposal to organize WIFS’16 over the Summer.

 

 

 

Following up this report, the individuals attending the meeting had a discussion about the sustainability and the future of WIFS. K. J. Ray Liu challenged the practice of the TC to have lower acceptance rate. It was originally an attempt to capture submissions from the Computer Science community which has different practices. However, in view of the flattish growth of WIFs over the last 5 years, it is questionable whether this strategy paid off. On the other hand, such low acceptance rate may deter some signal processing research teams to submit manuscripts. M. Wu and W. Trappe argued that the PC Chair of WIFS have never been in a position to reject manuscript solely based on acceptance rate criterions and that WIFS is in good health compared to other SPS TC workshops. M. Barni mentioned that WIFS is still relatively young and fragile and that the TC should be particularly careful when selecting locations. The edition in Rome this year is expected to be particularly attractive and participation numbers will serve as a strong indicator of the health of the workshop. WIFS may also benefit from other related workshops/conferences that seem to lose momentum (SPIE EI, ACM IHMMSec). This being said, the TC should take steps to promote some emerging topics e.g. by featuring some special sessions and advertising leading keynote speakers well in advance.

 

 

G. Doërr then provides a few statistics on the SPS conference featuring an IFS track whose review process is managed by members of the TC. ICASSP’15 attracted only 54 submissions, in stark decline compared to previous edition. This is mostly due to the location of the conference in Australia that turned off many research teams due to travel budget constraints. After the review process, 26 articles have been accepted for publications i.e. about 48% acceptance rate. ICIP’15 attracted 244 submissions nearly evenly distributed between biometrics EDICS and other IFS EDICS, similarly to previous editions. After the review process, 93 manuscripts have been accepted for publication i.e. about 38% acceptance rate. Finally, G. Doërr indicates that the submission deadline for ICASSP’16 in Shanghai, China is sooner than usual and that TC members should take that change into account in their schedule, knowing that they are expected to attend the TC meeting that will be hold there.

 

 

6. Awards Activities

 

Two awards were given to IFS researchers during ICASSP Awards Ceremony this year:

 

• Society Award: K. J. Ray Liu for “Influential technical contributions and profound leadership impact”.
• Young Author Best Paper Award: Tomáš Filler, Jan Judas and Jessica Fridrich for the paper titled, “Minimizing Additive Distortion in Steganography Using Syndrome-Trellis Codes,” published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 6, Number 3, September 2011

 

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G. Doërr that the IFS TC has been relatively less successful with awards nominations compared to past years and that it is important to put forward strong cases to compete with other TCs. SPS has recently a new uniform award procedure. It is already in line with our current practices described in our updated Procedures and there is therefore no impact for the IFS TC. The call for nominations for 2015 Distinguished Lecturers is currently on-going and the one for SPS Major Awards will follow soon afterwards.

 

 

7. Appointments

 

G. Doërr informs the TC that several individuals have been appointed as Associate Members to comply with our Policies and to promote emerging IFS areas: Mauro Barni (TIFS EiC), Patrizio Campisi (WIFS’15), David Doermann (DARPA IFS program), Nasir Memon (visibility initiative), Shantanu Rane (WIFS’14), Raphael Schaefer (physical layer security), Steven Simske (printed material security), Yan Sun (WIFS’14), Slava Voloshynovskiy (WIFS’15), Min Wu (SPM EiC), Vicky Zhao (WIFS’14). TC members are invited to contact the Chair should they have other names to suggest as Associate Members.

 

 

 

8. Education Activities

 

M. Wu indicates that she is currently working on a proposal for the SP Cup 2015 on ENF Forensics. She is currently liaising with several research teams worldwide both to lower the organization burden of such a challenge and to increase the geographical footprint of the organizers. The call for proposals is anticipated to be circulated during the Summer.

 

 

 

G. Doërr reminds that there is still little IFS visibility in SigView (http://sigview.org/). Distinguished Lecturer and WIFS keynote speakers should in particular consider this publication platform to provide greater visibility to their talks.

 

 

9. Website Activities

 

G. Doërr is pleading TC members to provide inputs to the Website Subcommittee to populate the IFS Message Board. A large majority of the messages posted there originates from the TC Chair. The platform will simply die if it is not regularly fueled with content. For the record, Matthias Kirchner indicated that he would investigate the feasibility and cost of having an IFS mailing list. He is expected to report on this during the new TC meeting in Rome, Italy.

 

 

 

10. Publications Activities

 

M. Barni, Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, indicates that the “Reject and Resubmit” (RR) option has been abandoned by SPS Publications Board to avoid confusion in the review process. He also mentions that SPS introduced a new “Accept with Mandatory Minor Revisions Including English Usage” (AQE) decision. In that case, authors will have to provide evidence of English editing e.g. receipt from an editing service or letter from a colleague who has assisted with editing. The objective is to maintain the editorial quality of SPS publications without raising the entry barrier for non-native English speakers. Finally, M. Barni reports on the statistics of published manuscripts in TIFS per EDICS: biometrics (54), network security (22), physical-layer security (15), forensic analysis (13), watermarking (11), anonymization (9), large networks (8), information theory (7), content hash (7), steganography (7), surveillance (6), hardware (4), human factors (1).

 

 

 

M. Wu, Editor in Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, encourages IFS members to submit manuscripts. She reminds that several options are available: special issue proposals for a series of articles, feature articles, columns and forum for shorter contributions. She also indicates that SPM will soon launch a community outreach on popular social networks and invite all IFS members to contribute.

 

 

G. Doërr reminds that the new SPS archiving service SigPort (http://sigport.org/) is now up and running thanks to the efforts of Yan sun, one of our IFS alumni. There are currently coupon code being circulated to deposit documents free of charges and it is a good opportunity to publicize your research paper presentations or posters.

 

 

11. Miscellaneous and Open Discussions

 

G. Doërr announces that he will work on consolidating IFS EDICS for ICASSP and ICIP, as well as SPL.

 

 

 

G. Doërr advises IFS TC members to be ready for upcoming TC activities, including: SP Cup proposal review and ballot, reviews for WIFS’15, SPS Major Awards nominations and ballot, WIFS’16 proposals review and ballot, IFS TC new members elections.

 

 

12. Next meeting

 

The next TC meeting will be held in Rome, Italy during WIFS 2015 (November 16-19, 2015). In view of the few members attending ICASSP this year, G. Doërr reminds everybody to take steps to attend WIFS. The meeting was adjourned at 14:30 (GMT+10) without objection.

 

 

 

WIFS 2014 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Thursday December 4, 2014, 12:00-13:30 (GMT+6)

At WIFS’14 @ GlobalSIP, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Prepared by Gwenaël Doërr and Min Wu

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members (5):Gwenaël Doërr, Pedro Comesaña-Alfaro, Matthias Kirchner, Yan Sun, Min Wu

Skype:  Patrick J. Flynn, Walter Scheirer

Guests & TC Alumni/Newcomers (10): Mauro Barni, Nasir Memon, Fernando Perez-Gonzalez, Hong Vicky Zhao, Wade Trappe, Avinash Varna, Teddy Furon, David Doermann

 

 

1. G. Doërr called for the meeting at 12:00 (GMT+6)

 

 

2. Roundtable for introductions

 

 

3. Elections Activities

 

 

G. Doërr reports on behalf of Chiou-Ting (Candy) Hsu who managed the elections this year. The TC received two candidatures for the Vice Chair position and 20 candidatures for Elected Member position. For the first time this year, the ballot used the online tool FluidSurveys recommended by the Society to manage the ballot. The experience has been smooth with no overhead and the TC is likely to re-use the tool in the future. The Nominations and Elections Subcommittee also provided a spreadsheet to help the TC members evaluating the impact of their vote on the balance of the TC with respect to various indicators such as male/female, academic/industry, junior/senior, IEEE region, etc. G. Doërr reminds the importance of preserving such a balance for the development of the Technical Committee in the long term.
 

Wade Trappe has been elected as Vice Chair. The following ten (10) candidates have been elected as Members of the TC: Marc Chaumont, Ann Dooms, Zekeriya Erkin, Patrick J. Flynn, Jiang Xudong, Fernando Perez-Gonzalez, Walter Scheirer, Avinash L. Varna, and Z. Jane Wang. G. Doërr stresses that the election is getting more and more competitive year after year and encourages prospective candidates to actively participate to IFS activities to raise their visibility in the TC before applying. He also mentions that he will invite a number of Associate Members to complement the current coverage of the TC and promote emerging areas.
 

G. Doërr then thanks Min Wu who will be retiring of the TC at the end of the year and who will move on to her new responsibilities as the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He also thanks retiring Members for their continued service: Patrick Bas, Dinei Florencio, Anthony Ho, Jiwu Huang, Ching-Yung Li, Anderson Rocha, Husrev Sencar, Yun Q. Shi, and Yan (Lindsay) Sun. He reminds them that they have the opportunity to be elected for another term after a one-year retirement period, as demonstrated by the return of three (3) IFS alumni this year.

 

 

 

4. Conference Activities

 

 

G. Doërr first report on the health of the IFS tracks at ICASSP and ICIP. Due to the remote location of ICASSP that will be held in Brisbane (Australia) in Spring 2015, the IFS track only attracted 54 submissions i.e. the lowest number on our historical records. The reviewing workload is therefore low this year and TC members are reminded to provide their review in a timely manner (deadline in a few weeks). For ICIP, the Area Chairs have been assigned and the review process is anticipated to begin at some point in February 2015. G. Doërr indicates a number of IFS-related proposal submissions for special sessions or workshops, namely: W. Hamidouche and W. Puech – “Privacy and Security in the new Generation Video Coding System” at ICIP 2015; R. Merkel, J. Dittmann, and C. Vielhauer – “Multimedia Crime Scene Forensics for Fingerprint Acquisition and Processing” at ICME 2015; and S. Papadopoulos, M. Barni, A. Piva, and A. Hanjalic – “Workshop on Web Multimedia Verification” at ICME 2015. He also reports on a new SPS practice approved by the Conference Board: the organizers of SPS main conferences are now required to contact TC Chairs to get an approximate forecast of the number of submissions and an anticipated acceptance rate in view of the target location for the conference.
 

Y. Sun then reports on WIFS’14 which is hosted this year as part of the GlobalSIP conference. The workshop attracted 102 submissions this year in line with prior editions and 39 of them have been accepted for publication. The technical Program also includes two keynote talks and two overview presentations. This year, WIFS features a special track on Security and the Internet of Things led by N. Memon and R. Yu. The organizers managed to secure US$ 5.5k financial support from industrial partners and it helped planning some of the social functions e.g. speaker hospitality and special events. The social event comprises a tour of CNN studios and a gala dinner at the Sun Dial restaurant. G. Doërr notes that there is limited participation from Asia and that WIFS only marginally succeeded to leverage on its well-attended edition in China in 2013. Y. Sun then comments on the overall experience of organizing WIFS as part of GlobalSIP and balances pros and cons. While the beginning of the relationship has been rather rocky (management of competing proposals on security; slipping deadlines; responsibility dilution; website management; separate proceedings), the end result is rather positive. The main friction points relate to (i) the premium ticket which had been perceived as a ploy to attract additional money but which was necessary to finance some of the social functions, (ii) the deadlines which have been postponed resulting in a very much delayed call for demos and on-going works which only attracted a handful of submissions, and (iii) the lack of information on the conference website. G. Doërr mentions that some of these elements were out of our control this year but that some others can be addressed by the TC. In particular, he reminds that reviews by IFS TC Members should always comprise a couple of sentences in order to be useful to the authors (to improve their manuscript) and to the Program Chairs (to make their decision). He then opens the floor and collects additional feedback that will be forwarded to the newly created ad-hoc subcommittee in charge of improving the participation of TCs to GlobalSIP. The general feeling is a bit contrasted but there is a consensus that TC-run legacy workshops and ephemeral workshops at GlobalSIP should be managed in two completely different manners.
 

P. Comesaña-Alfaro then reports on the selection process for the next edition of WIFS. We received two proposals: Rome (Italy) led by P .Campisi and N. Memon and Delft (The Netherlands) led by Z. Erkin and Jan C. A. van der Lubbe. The ballot has been rather tight but the Rome proposal has been eventually selected. F. Perez-Gonzalez then briefly provides an overview of the proposal on behalf of the organizers. G. Doërr highlights that the conference venue offers the flexibility to run WIFS as a single track event or a dual track one and thus encourages all IFS members to contribute to success of WIFS’15 and submit proposals for special sessions or other additions to the technical program.

 

 

 

5. Awards Activities

 

 

M. Wu reports that there has been no nomination for Distinguished Lecturer this year. The subcommittee had identified a few potential candidates but they indicated that they were not available at this time due to other commitments.
 

M. Wu then indicates that the IFS TC Members decided by vote to endorse three nominations for 2014 SPS Major Awards:

 

• Best Paper Award: “Information-theoretically Secret Key Generation for Fading Wireless Channels”, by C. Ye, S. Mathur, A. Reznik, W. Trappe, N. Mandayam, in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, June 2010.
• Sustained Impact Award: “Secure Spread Spectrum Watermarking for Multimedia”, by Ingemar J. Cox, Joe Kilian, F. Thomson Leighton, Talal Shamoon, in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, December 1997.
• Technical Achievement Award: Prof. Pierre Moulin.

 

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She also mentions that a nomination for Young Author Best Paper Award has been forwarded for consideration to the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security to avoid a conflict of interest for one of the TC members. The results are expected to be announced at the beginning of 2015.

G. Doërr reports on an on-going discussion for uniform TC award procedure by the Society’s Technical Direction Board. The proposal details an anonymous review process prior to the nomination and recommends a voting procedure. Most of the suggestions are already implemented by the IFS TC and this new procedure is therefore expected to have limited impact on our TC. The proposal will be formally examined by the Conference Board on Friday evening.

 

 

 

 

6. Education Activities

 

 

G. Doërr reminds that M. Wu was considering submitting a proposal for the SP Cup on ENF forensics at ICASSP 2014 in Firenze, Italy. However, due to other commitments, she decided to postpone this initiative to next year and will try to strengthen the proposal by enrolling co-organizers from other research labs.
 

G. Doërr notes that there is still very limited participation to SigView. He encourages current and past IFS Distinguished Lecturers to post their talks on this streaming platforms and encourage WIFS organizers to approach their keynote speakers to do the same. He reinforces the message that active participation to Society-wide initiatives is instrumental to raise the visibility of IFS in SPS and to attract new researchers in our community.
 

G. Doërr reports that there has not been an IFS Seasonal School yet. He mentions to the organizers of WIFS’15 that they may consider organizing one back to back with WIFS. D. Doermann suggests that the IFS TC may consider simply organizing a PhD day where students talks about their research (research topic poster presentation in early years, overview oral presentation in late years). Besides offering improved value to attending students, it may be a means to attract additional delegates from the industry who want to know research students that will be soon available on the employment market. This practice has been shown effective in other computer/information science conferences.

 

 

 

7. Website Activities

 

 

G. Doërr reports that the social framework set in place by the Website subcommittee led by P. Bas has now been running for several months without any major glitch. He encourages IFS TC members to send inputs to the subcommittee to nurture this news feed (new books, IFS stories in the news, call for papers, IFS-related awards, etc). A publication framework without input will simply die on its own. The same comment holds for the Job Marketplace which has seen very few openings over the last year.

 

 

 

8. Publications Activities

 

 

G. Doërr formally announces that M. Barni is the new Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
 

Y. Sun reports on SigPort which is now in testing phase. This new publication platform is expected to be some kind of arxiv-like repository for SPS. The objective is to publish research results that may not be ready for publication in IEEE SPS journals e.g. master thesis, research reports, SP Cup reports, preliminary versions of an article, etc.  Y. Sun will succeed M. Wu to lead the SigPort effort from January 2015.

 

 

 

9. Miscellaneous and Open Discussions

 

 

G. Doërr announces that the IFS TC will be reviewed during ICASSP in Brisbane, Australia. A quick poll suggests that there may be very limited attendance from TC Members this year.
 

G. Doërr mentions that the IFS Policies and Procedures have not been updated since 2010 and no longer reflect the practices of the TC. They will be updated in Q1 2015 prior to the TC review.
 

G. Doërr indicates that few members of the IFS community apply for IEEE Grade elevation. The IFS TC will collect information from IEEE MemberNET for researchers currently listed as affiliate/associate/elected/alumni members to contact individuals who could apply for Senior Grade elevation and identify candidate for potential Fellow elevation.
 

G. Doërr reports on feedback received from various sources about WIFS and the IFS community at large. For some people, there seems to be a lack of identity i.e. the glue connecting the different IFS research communities (beyond the shared security flavor). As a result, IFS is perceived in some cases as aggregate of disconnected clusters and it might hamper the development of the TC in the long term. He probes attendees for their own perception and asks whether it would make sense to write a manifesto that would clarify the scope of security and forensics in signal processing and the potential for cross-fertilization across various communities. Several researchers indicate that their feeling is that the situation is not as bad as reported. The IFS TC decides to postpone any action related to this but will closely monitor the situation.
 

M. Wu formally introduces D. Doermann, a new program manager of DARPA who is currently contemplating the opportunity of launching a research program on multimedia forensics in the US. D. Doermann then briefly describes the context of this effort and indicates that he will discuss with different IFS representatives during the week to gather relevant feedback.

 

 

 

10. Next meeting

 

 

The next TC meeting will be held in Brisbane, Australia during ICASSP 2015 (April 20-24, 2015).

The meeting was adjourned at 13:30 without objection.

 

 

ICASSP  2014  IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Thursday May 8, 2014, 13:00-15:00 (GMT+1)

At ICASSP’13, Florence, Italy

Minutes prepared by G. Doërr and M. Wu

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: Gwenaël Doërr, Patrick Bas, Marco Tagliasacchi, Hitoshi Kiya, Jiwu Huang, Anthony Ho, Yan Sun, Samson Cheung, Tanya Ignatenko, Dinei Florencio, Matthias Kirchner, Oscar Au, Peter Hong,

Skype:  Min Wu

Guests: Patrizio Campisi, Teddy Furon, Nasir Memon, Jean-Luc Dugelay, Mauro Barni, Slava Voloshynovskiy, Xiangui Kang

 

 

1. G. Doërr called for the meeting at 13:00

 

 

2. Roundtable for introductions

 

 

3. Updates from the Technical Direction Board

 

 

G. Doërr reports on a number of items that had been discussed during the Technical Direction Board (TDB) meeting a few days earlier.  And the TC meeting participants discussed some of these issues as summarized below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

•     “The Power of a Name” discussion. The Society is currently contemplating the possibility of changing its name for a larger impact to general public, who is hardly aware of what ‘signal processing’ refers to. The initiative received mixed feedback from the different Technical Committees (TC) and the Society has therefore opened up a blog on the SPS website to collect feedback from a wider audience. G. Doërr encouraged the members of the IFS TC to go there on post their own view about the matter.
• Internet of Things and Big Data. The Society created a new type of administrative entity referred to as Special Interest Groups (SIG). A SIG should be viewed as a light weight TC with a limited life-span (typically 3 years) to quickly address emerging technical areas. Successful SIGs will have the opportunity to convert into a TC on a case-by-case basis. The first two SPS SIGs will deal with the Internet of Things and Big Data.
• FluidSurveys. The TDB subscribed to an online tool to conduct elections and polls. Each TC will have the opportunity to obtain an account to run various ballots and elections. G. Doërr encouraged in particular the Nominations and Elections Subcommittee to evaluate the tool to assess whether it could streamline the election process of new TC members.
• SPS acceptance rate policy. After observing a few discrepancies over the last few years, the chair of the Conference Board announced the new policy relating to the acceptance rate of SPS flagship conferences: ICASSP and ICIP. The target is to have 45% of the submitted papers published with a flexibility of +/-3%. Historically, ICASSP is on the higher end and ICIP on the lower end.
• EDAS conference management. The chair of the TDB announced that SPS is currently collecting feedback regarding the use of EDAS for ICASSP and ICIP. After a few hiccups, it looks like things are mostly under control, and there is room for improvement with respect to the user interface. Several TC requested the addition of a feature to see the reviews of the other reviewers, which may be an option to activate in the configuration of the system. M. Barni mentioned that there is significantly less support to a conference team for adopting EDAS (compared to some other full-service conference management/support options), and therefore, in terms of conference organization, it is recommended to have a dedicated chair to take care of the system if EDAS is chosen for paper and registration handling.
• EDAS conference management.The information related to seeing reviews of others triggered a number of conflicting comments from the members of the IFS TC. Some people do not see the interest of such visibility and will actually not look at it. Some people highlighted the risk of biasing the reviewing process and stressed that if such visibility shall be provided in the future, it should only occur once the final decision has been made. Representatives of the MMSP TC reported on their own experience with a rebuttal phase for ICME and mentioned that it notably lengthen the reviewing process for a marginal impact on the final decision. G. Doërr will compile all the comments from the IFS TC and send a feedback email to the TDB.

 

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4. Conference Activities

 

G. Doërr reports that 56 papers out of 122 had been accepted for publication in the IFS track at ICASSP 2014. This is a record number of submissions and may be due to the nice and central location (Florence, Italy). Still, a number of security-related papers were submitted in various other sessions, e.g. papers dealing with physical security. Relevant IFS TC members are encouraged to connect with this community to make the community aware of the IFS activities (e.g. WIFS) and encourage their participation.

 

 

G. Doërr reports that ICIP 2014 attracted nearly 300 submissions in the IFS track. This is also a record number of submissions and may be due to another nice location (Paris, France). The reviewing process has been delayed for various reasons, but the final decision notifications should be sent out soon.

 

 

J. Huang reports on WIFS 2013, previously held in December in China. The surplus reaches 11%, below the usual SPS target of 20%. Jiwu is experiencing difficulties to officially close the book of the workshop due to the departure of a person in the IEEE SPS staff. This is simply a matter of identifying the correct contact and will be sorted out shortly.

 

 

Y. Sun reports on the progress of WIFS 2014. After several delays, it is now official: GlobalSIP will host WIFS in Atlanta in 2014. The objective is to leverage on the format of the symposium to lower the organizational burden on our side. For information, the open call attracted two alternate security-related proposals, one on the security of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the other one on Active Authentication (AA). In view of the gentleman agreement with GlobalSIP that there should be no security-related competing event, we proposed to incorporate the two proposals as dedicated tracks within WIFS. The IoT proposal led by N. Memon (past IFS member) accepted while AA declined. Next, Yan showed the floor plan of the conference center and indicated the rooms which have been allocated to WIFS, essentially the keynote area that is unused besides GlobalSIP plenary talks. The organization team also intends to have short tutorial/overview talks over lunch break due to logistic constraints that preclude having a full day dedicated to tutorials as in previous editions. Yan then elaborates on the fee structure. WIFS authors will have to pay for the general GlobalSIP registration and a WIFS premium ticket. The premium ticket will provide access to WIFS plenary talks, discussion panels, and social event. It will be sold as a separate item to all attendees at registration. Regarding the social event, there are currently two options: a cost-effective one in the club room of the conference center and another one at the world of Coca-Cola. On this occasion, G. Doërr reminds that all TC members should help the organization team to make this edition a success by (i) publicizing the call for papers in relevant research communities in order to attract submissions and (ii) forwarding contacts of companies that are likely to financially support the event with a grant. Following up a comment, G. Doërr will also investigate how to guarantee that WIFS proceedings appear separately in IEEExplore.

 

 

G. Doërr asks P. Comesaña and his conf/workshop subcommittee to prepare and launch the call for proposals for WIFS 2015. P. Campisi expresses a potential interest to organize it in Roma, Italy. N. Memon mentions that he could also have an option in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

 

 

5. Awards/Elections Activities

 

 

G. Doërr reminds on behalf on M. Wu that there is an on-going call for nominating Distinguished Lecturers. The IFS TC has historically quite successful with this award. A number of renowned individuals have been approached but, due to other commitments in the year to come, they declined our invitations so far. As a result, we are still looking for strong candidates. The voting procedure will follow-up shortly.

 

 

G. Doërr then announces that the call for nominations for SPS major awards will be issued soon: (SPM/SPL) best paper award, best young paper award, overview paper award, sustained impact paper award, etc. Last year, the IFS TC (and TIFS EB)’s endorsed nominations were unsuccessful in the ultimate award selection on the SPS level due to increased competitions. The TDB is currently working on harmonizing nomination practices across TCs but the outcome of this consultation may come in to late for this year. In this case, the IFS TC will proceed with the same rules as last year e.g. endorsement/co-nomination thresholds, management of conflict of interests, etc. In view of the increasing importance given to citation metrics, it is crucial to move forwards nominations that have a chance to compete at the Society level. As raised by T. Furon, this is particularly challenging for our small-size community that inherently put the citation record for IFS publications in a disadvantage position.

 

 

Finally, G. Doërr reminds that the TC will renew one third of the TC members as usual and will also elect its Vice-Chair this year. The nomination period is expected to run during the second half of the summer with a ballot in Fall. All TC members are encouraged to identify potential motivated candidates that would be willing to participate in the IFS TC. Based on the experience of past years, Gwenaël reminds that participating to various IFS activities (contest, reviews, conferences, etc) prior to the ballot is definitely a plus to be known by the current members and thereby attract more votes.

 

 

6. Contest Activities

 

 

G. Doërr reports on behalf of A. Rocha that the organizers of the first IFS challenge run in 2013 are looking into publishing a column in the Signal Processing Magazine to make the result of the contest known to a wider audience. The website hosting the contest will also be maintained for interested researchers who would like to benchmark their latest forensic algorithms. Afterward, Gwenaël probes whether there would be interest in organizing a second contest. In view of the efforts dedicated to the first contest, the TC members agree not to organize a second edition immediately. N. Memon mentions that organizing such contests from scratch is highly time-consuming and requires a lot of dedication. He mentions that NYU set up a platform to host capture-the-flag contests. The IFS-TC may consider leveraging on this platform to facilitate the organization of future IFS contests.

 

 

G. Doërr then highlights the importance of participating to activities at the Society level which provides greater visibility. The SP cup competition could be one option and Gwenaël mentioned that M. Wu is considering putting in a proposal related to IFS. Min then presents a rough plan of her tentative proposal one electric power signatures (ENF), which is organized in two main tasks: building an ENF measurement apparatus and exploiting the obtained recordings to answer forensic questions e.g. the place and time of the acquisition. The objective would be to tap in the basic circuit/electronics, data acquisition/sampling, and signal processing knowledge of undergrad students at junior and beginning senior level. She plans to investigate with potential partners in different parts of the world if there is a possibility to team up to run this contest and will get back to the TC in case it is feasible. G. Doërr indicates that the timeline is extremely tight and that the proposal may be postponed to next year.

 

 

 

7. Website Activities

 

Now that the IFS website has been equipped with social media capabilities, it is important to provide content to keep it alive. G. Doërr encourages all TC members to liaise with the website subcommittee and to forward relevant information (special issues, call for papers, open positions, news announcements) so that it could be publicized. He also encourages them to proactively look for potential individual that could be enrolled in the communities on the different social platforms, both from the academic world and the industrial arena.

 

 

8. Community Building

 

While the IFS TC has one of the highest affiliate members per published paper in ICASSP ratio in SPS, there is definitely room for improvement. There is momentum building in the Society to go beyond scientific contributions only. In particular, they are looking for initiatives that would provide meaningful services to signal processing practitioners in the industry and student members. It is critical to sustain the growth of the Society, and G. Doërr highlights that the TC should also embrace this effort at the IFS level. The IFS community indeed remains relatively small and there is a growing concern that we might not reach the critical mass to be self-sustainable. Each TC member should therefore look into means to build the community. One idea would be to further enlarge the scope of the TC. Another idea is participate in high visibility initiatives such as SigView and seasonal schools. In particular, keynotes given at WIFS and lectures given by IFS-endorsed Distinguished Lecturers should definitely be recorded to raise awareness and stimulate interest.

 

 

9. Publication News

 

TIFS is doing well in terms of submissions, and its citation influence is improving from last year. Jay Kuo will retire at the end of the year. The next Editor in Chief shall be announced shortly.

 

 

The deployment of SigPort is under way. M. Wu and Y. Sun have been involved in this SPS initiative. Y. Sun presents a short video clip prepared by M. Wu illustrating the basic functionality of a pilot system.

 

 

10. Next meeting

 

 

The next TC meeting will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, during WIFS 2014 (December 3-5, 2014).
The meeting was adjourned at 15:00 without objection.

 

 

WIFS 2013 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Wednesday Nov. 20, 2013, 12:40-14:00 (GMT+8)

At WIFS’13, Guangzhou, China

Minutes prepared by G. Doërr and M. Wu

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: Gwenaël Doërr, Teddy Furon, Samson Cheung, Yun-Qing Shi, Alessandro Piva, Wenjun Zeng, Alex Kot, Anthony T S. Ho, Jiwu Huang

Skype:  Shantanu Rane, Min Wu, Patrick Bas

Guests: Matthias Kirchner, Fernando Perez-Gonzalez, Mauro Barni, Jean-Luc Dugelay, Nasir Memon, Ton Kalker, Vicky Zhao

 

 

1. G. Doërr called for the meeting at 12:50

 

 

2. WIFS’13

 

 

J. Huang reported on the current edition of the Workshop on Information Forensics and Security. In comparison with previous editions, the workshop attracted fewer submission than usual (~100) due to unexpected competition from other events (GlobalSIP, IWDW, …). Nevertheless, the quality of the presented papers remains high, each paper receiving 4 reviews and the acceptance rate being around 35%, in line with previous editions.  Encouragingly, the workshop reported record attendance: 134 attendees including local students.

 

 

The workshop featured two tutorials that were well attended (~100 attendees per tutorial). Three keynote talks will be given:

1.    Jaap Haitsma (Civolution) walked the attendees through the technology transfer of a Matlab research prototype to a commercialized product deployed worldwide.

2.    Pierangela Samarati (Università degli Studi di Milano) discussed security and privacy issues in the cloud, highlighting similar challenges in the signal processing and computer science arenas.

3.    Nasir Memon (Polytechnic Institute of NYU) will give tomorrow a refreshing talk on the need for new paradigms for user authentication on emerging interfaces.
 

There will also be a special session to discuss the lessons learned from the first IFS challenge (see below). Finally, several social events have been interleaved throughout the program to facilitate discussions and further build up the IFS community (welcome reception, cruise, gala dinner).

 

 

3. IFS TC Forensics Challenge

 

 

A. Piva reported on the first IFS challenge on image tampering. About 10+ different research teams actively participated to the challenge. While it may not be as strong as could be expected, it is rather encouraging for a first edition. The first part of the challenge was targeting image tampering detection and raised interesting strategies. In particular, one research team identified very quickly that 2 bits in the file format were different for pristine vs. tampered image. This being said, even signal processing-based strategies yielded near perfect classification results. In contrast, the second part of the challenge was targeting image tampering localization. This second phase proved to be significantly more challenging with the best team achieving barely 40% accuracy. In contrast to similar challenges (BOWS1, BOWS2, BOSS), it means that the challenge has not been defeated and that the problem is still open.

 

 

WIFS’13 will feature a special session on the challenge including a brief introduction by the organizers, presentations by the different winners of the challenge, the award ceremony, and a panel discussion. Besides the file-base strategy, the participants essentially reused well-established strategies e.g. copy-paste detection, PRNU alteration detection, etc.
The website will remain online and the dataset available to the public for further research. TC members discussed various potential follow-up actions e.g. organizing a 2nd edition, revisiting the contest to make it part of the next SP Cup. This being said, no decision has been taken and opportunities will be explored later in 2014.

 

 

 

4. WIFS 2014

 

P. Comesaña Alfaro reported on the next edition of the workshop. This year, the TC received a single proposal to organize WIFS and it received near unanimous support during the ballot (21: YES, 1: NO). As a result, the proposal is accepted and WIFS’14 will be hosted by GlobalSIP that will be hold in Atlanta, Georgia, USA in December 2014. One of the objectives motivating this new concept is to delegate the organizational logistics to GlobalSIP and thereby save the energy of the IFS team to focus on the technical program.

V. Zhao, who is part of the organization team, then provided further details. In particular, she announced that the general chairs already approached the organizers of GlobalSIP in order to discuss a number of points (finances, room booking, social events, etc). The goal is to obtain very quickly a list of pain points that may emerge and to devise mitigating strategies to tackle them. While the TC does not want to lose control over some fundamental elements, the objective is to also plainly participate to the concept of GlobalSIP in order to get our community further acknowledged. This induced that some compromises will need to be found. For instance, there may not be a dedicated IFS social event. Similarly, due to scheduling constraints, tutorials may be reduced to more focused overview talks that will be given over lunch breaks (lunch boxes provided). For reference, GlobalSIP registration fee this year was around $625 (slightly above WIFS historical figures).

 

 

All in all, there seems to be interesting avenues for synergies but the organization team will need to keep a careful eye on some key elements. To help them in this process, they will work in close relationship with the WIFS subcommittee of the TC.

 

 

5. Elections

 

 

G. Doërr reported on behalf of Y. Sun about the renewal of the Technical Committee. This year, the election attracted 23 candidatures while only 9 seats were available for renewal. All TC members then had to indicate their preference/approval votes in line with the procedures of the TC. For the first time, the members of the TC had a spreadsheet available (thanks to T. Furon for updating the MMSP model) to evaluate the impact of their ballots on some statistics about the TC representation e.g. gender, geographical, technical area balance.

 

 

The following individuals have been elected for the 2014-2016 term:

T. Charles Clancy, Jana Dittmann, Y.-W. Peter Hong, Tanya Ignatenko, Matthias Kirchner, Hitoshi Kiya, Negar Kivayash, Ashwin Swaminathan, and Marco Tagliacchi.

G. Doërr highlighted that this election is getting increasingly competitive and that unsuccessful are encouraged to engage with the activities of the IFS TC (reviews for WIFS/ICASSP/ICIP, publish/attend WIFS/ICASSP/ICIP, organize IFS events, etc) to raise their visibility within the TC. This has been shown to play a major role during the voting process.

 

 

The following members will retire in 2014:

Campisi, Teddy Furon, Alex C. Kot, Alessandro Piva, Shantanu Rane, Wade Trappe, Sviatoslav Voloshynovskiy, Ja-Ling Wu, Wenjun Zeng.

G. Doërr reminded that the IFS policy enforces at least a 1-year retirement period but that past members are more than welcome to apply again afterwards.

 

 

As usual, the duties within the TC will be reshuffled in 2014. In particular, M. Wu will pass the baton to G. Doërr who will become the new TC Chair. Members interested in chairing a subcommittee are welcome and should get in touch with the TC Chair and Vice-chair.

 

 

6. Awards

 

 

Supported by a the recommendation of the IFS TC, Alex C. Kot has been elected as a Distinguished Lecturer for 2014-2015. M. Wu reminded the very good track record of the TC with respect to such nominations.

 

 

G. Doërr then reported on the nomination process for SPS major awards. It was the first year that the new nominations policy was enforced: conflict of interest (CoI) rule that prevent TCs to nominate one of their members, 2-stage nomination process with possible direct nomination through the SPS Award Board, etc. The policy is still in progress and is currently being refined based on the experience gained this year. M. Wu detailed the approach that the IFS TC enforced based on the discussions at ICASSP’13 and received positive feedback. For the record, this year, there has been no request to vet a nomination that would have gone directly to the Award Board.

 

 

The TC received 8 nominations. G. Doërr reported that it was difficult to get nominations despite a stronger involvement of the area chairs this year. After coordination at the subcommittee level (mostly to accommodate the CoI rule) and the vote of the TC members, three nominations were moved forward eventually:

- 2 co-nominations (at least 2/3 support from the TC) for the TIFS Best Paper Award: E. A. Verbitskiy, P. Tuyls, C. Obi, B. Schoenmakers, and B. Skoric, “Key Extraction From General Nondiscrete Signals”, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 5(2):269-279, June 2010; M. Kirchner and R. Bohme, “Hiding Traces of Resampling in Digital Images”, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 3(4):582-592, November 2008.

- 1 endorsement (at least 1/2 support from the TC) for the SPL Best Paper Award: Z. Zhang, D. Yi, Z. Lei, and S.Z. Li, “Regularized Transfer Boosting for Face Detection Across Spectrum”, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 19(3):131-134, March 2012.

 

The selected nominations have been forwarded to SPS Award Board for consideration.

 

 

 

 

7. Publications

 

G. Doërr reported on behalf of J. Kuo, Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). Statistics showed a steady increase of the number of submitted manuscripts that permitted to further reduce the acceptance rate of the transactions. In 2012, there were 757 articles submitted for publication and 110 were published with an acceptance rate of 16.8%. After a decrease of its ISI impact factor in recent years, TIFS is now regaining impact and is still highly competitive with respect to other security-related publications.

 

 

G. Doërr also reminded the new dual publication route (journal + presentation in a conference) for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL). As a result, it makes it a rather interesting venue for short publications.

 

 

Finally, G. Doërr and M. Wu mentioned the initiative SigPort, led by SPS Membership Board, which is currently being shaped. The objective is to build an ‘arXiv-like’ repository where researchers could publish technical reports, PhD theses and other technical documents for a small fee to self sustain the operation. Inputs are welcome and the specific business model in particular is in discussion.

 

 

8. Website

 

G. Doërr reported on behalf of P. Bas the on-going test trial to redirect the RSS feed of the IFS website to social platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) using HootSuite. There are still some corner cases but the system should go live in December. TC members were reminded that such architecture will prove useless if they are not fed regularly with content, including news, reference data sets, opening, etc. All members have been encouraged to contribute.

 

 

9. Growth of the IFS community

 

Figures indicate that the IFS presence is growing in all major SPS publication venues, namely WIFS, ICASSP, and ICIP. More and more papers are submitted and more and more delegates are attending these events. While this is a good sign, sustaining this trend needs continued effort, e.g. by organizing special IFS-related sessions at ICASSP and ICIP.

 

 

The TC then discussed how to engage and expand the community. For instance, how could we attract more affiliate members and, more critically, how to involve them? It appears that the TC is doing well at developing the research side of the community but that it could (should?) do better with respect to education and industry. Moreover, there were also discussions about the risk of low acceptance rates in the long term and the possible need for offer some less selective, though well-identifiable, routes for publication and participation in IFS venues.

 

 

10. Educational activities

 

 

While it has high importance at SPS level, the IFS visibility is rather limited. Several initiatives at society-level are currently on-going and the TC needs to engage more strongly. G. Doërr reminded that we should encourage Distinguished Lecturers, keynote speakers, and tutorial presenters to record their talks, when relevant, to publish them on SigView. Next year, the Challenge and Education subcommittees will also be investigating how the IFS TC could contribute to the SP Cup for undergrads (less research oriented, more like an undergrad project), and for Education committee, what could be the first IFS-focused Seasonal School.

 

 

11. Industry activities

 

 

The IFS TC historically had strong links with the copyright protection industry, and more particularly the watermarking companies. However, the scope of the TC is now much wider and it is necessary to involve other companies to better reflect the positioning of the TC. This is critical (i) to diversify the sources of financial support for IFS-related events, (ii) to provide a perspective beyond the PhD to students, and (iii) to avoid the IFS research from being disconnected of practical problems. In 2014, the Industry subcommittee will explore how to reduce the gap between IFS practitioners vs. IFS researchers.

 

 

12. Upcoming duties

 

 

ICASSP and ICIP reviews will take place over the next couple of months. All TC members are reminded to take all necessary steps to perform their reviews in a timely fashion.

 

 

 

13. Next meeting

 

 

The next TC meeting will be held in Florence, Italy, during ICASSP 2014 (May 4-9, 2014).

The meeting was adjourned at 14:00 without objection.

 

 

ICASSP 2013 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Friday 31 May 2013, 12:45 – 14:20 PM

At ICASSP 2013, Vancouver, Canada

Minutes prepared by G. Doërr and M. Wu

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: M. Wu, G. Doërr, P. Comesana Alfaro, Y. Sun, A. Kot, J. Huang, D. Florencio, P. Campisi, T. Filler, J. Li, O. Au, S. Rane, T. Furon (via Skype), Jay Kuo

Associate members:  P. Moulin, F. Perez-Gonzalez

Guests: M. Stamm, S. Lai, S. Tomasin, S. Tubaro

 

 

1. M. Wu called for the meeting at 12:45pm

 

 

2. IFS TC Forensics Challenge

The challenge is co-organized by J. Huang, A. Rocha, and A. Piva.  The challenge will start on June 1st and will run in two independent overlapping phases. In phase 1 (June-August), the objective will be to detect the presence of tampering. In phase 2 (July-September), the objective will be to localize tampering operations. The image corpus consists of 1,700 digital images that have been tampered with, nearly three times larger than the 700 images that were originally planned. Eventually, the dataset will be made available to the public for research purpose. The website hosting the challenge has been launched in May and is up and running. It may be mirrored if needed to balance the server load.

The contest has been advertised through several complementary routes: email campaign, SPS eNewsletter, IFS and WIFS websites, etc. A short presentation has been displayed during the IFS lecture session at ICASSP. The presentation will be circulated to the TC members and they are encouraged to advertise the contest at the relevant scientific events that they will be attending in the next few weeks.

Five awards will be handed out in the form of travel expenses being paid to attend WIFS’13 in Guangzhou. The winners and runners-up of each phase are anticipated to be rewarded, as well as the best forger. The awards are financially supported by grants from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the European project REWIND.
 

 

 

3. WIFS 2013

J. Huang provides a status report of the organization on the next edition of WIFS, to be held in Guangzhou, China in November  2013.

Seventy individuals have been invited to join the technical program committee in order to reduce the review load and to enlarge the area coverage of the TPC (e.g. information theory). The members are rather well distributed geographically with 20 different countries being represented.

The call for papers has been advertised in many forums: presentation and hardcopies in relevant conferences (ICASSP, IWDW, ICIP, ACM IHMMSec), advertisement in SPS publications (T-IFS, IFS website, SPS eNewsletter), email broadcast. EasyChair has been selected as the reviewing system and is ready to receive submissions. Four proposals have been received for tutorials and will be decided soon. No special session proposal has been received and therefore the only anticipated dedicated track will the one for the IFS challenge. The keynote speakers will be decided in the next two weeks. IFS TC members are encouraged to further participate to the publicity of the workshop.

The contract with the hotel has been signed. This is the best 4* hotel in Guangzhou. A good discount deal has been negotiated by the organizers for WIFS attendees. The registration system, locally managed by the university, has been installed and needs to be tested. G. Doërr mentions that special care should be taken about the coverage of credit cards, in particular American Express (AMEX) routinely assigned to corporate employees. The organizers are investigating opportunities to have a tour around Guangzhou. They are also in the process of applying for more funding to guarantee the financial health of the IFS TC flagship workshop. M. Wu reminds that the health of our workshop has been praised on many occasions in different boards of the Society.
 

 

 

4. WIFS 2014

Pedro Comesana has been appointed as the new Chair of the WIFS subcommittee. He will be supported by G. Doërr and F. Perez-Gonzalez in an advisory role. His first task will be to manage the next call for proposals. Although there is no strict rotation policy being enforced by the TC, WIFS’14 is foreseen to go back to North America, which raises the recurring question whether or not to run the workshop under the umbrella of GlobalSIP (Atlanta in 2014?).

M. Wu reports that she voiced the concerns of our technical committee (lack of coordination with the TC, lack of involvement of the TC in the vetting process of relevant symposiums, uncontrolled overlap of the submission dates, etc) at the meeting of the Technical Directions Board held during ICASSP. Most of the troubles experienced this year seem to be due to the late organization of GlobalSIP. It has been recognized that there have been glitches in the interaction with the TCs and there are on-going discussions to figure out what is the best formula to yield a better coordination. Historically, GlobalSIP is intended to host two types of symposiums: (i) small workshops for emerging new fields that are not yet covered by SPS events and (ii) legacy SPS workshops. The edition in 2013 focused on the first type of events due to late organization but it does not foretell anything about what will happen in the future.

The members of the TC then discussed the pros and cons of running WIFS jointly with GlobalSIP. On the bright side, it shifts most of the logistics burden to the organizers of GlobalSIP. Additionally, having the GlobalSIP umbrella may help foreign attendees to circumvent US visa limitations by not mentioning explicitly security in their application files. On the other hand, there are also several potential issues: there is the risk of losing WIFS’ identity, there is the risk of losing control over financial grants awarded to WIFS, there is the risk of not being able to have our own keynote speakers and social events since we would no longer have control over finances...

The fact that WIFS has been run in a healthy fashion for the last few years and that we would be the first TC to experiment with this recipe actually put us in a favourable position to negotiate with the organizers of GlobakSIP. All in all, it has been agreed to leave the opportunity to the bidders to come forward with a proposal being part of GlobalSIP. Such proposals will be asked to also investigate a fallback solution in case the organization of GlobalSIP is so much delayed that our TC will need to vote before they agreed on the details. On another front, M. Wu will liaise with the Conference Board to assess how much room there is for negotiation.

Y. Sun and S. Rane hinted that they may be interesting in exploring a proposal.
 

 

 

5. Awards and Nomination

Gwenaël Doërr has been appointed as the new Chair of the subcommittee.

Jay Kuo (past subcom chair) reports that there have been two nominations for Distinguished Lecturers in 2013: Alex Kot and Jan Allebach. Both nominations received strong support during the ballot and they are therefore endorsed by the IFS TC.

The Award nomination deadline has been moved forward by one month by the Society and G. Doërr will therefore circulate the call for nominations promptly after ICASSP. The same two-tiers ballot system as last year will be put in place: nominations that receive more than 2/3 support will be co-nominated by the IFS TC; nominations that receive more than 1/2 support will be endorsed by the IFS TC; nominations that receive less than 1/2 support will be returned to the nominator.

G. Doërr mentions that the Society introduced a new award for the Signal Processing Letters and modified the rules for conflict of interest avoidance. A Technical Committee can no longer nominate a paper co-authored by ones of its members. M. Wu and G. Doërr also indicated that a discussion period has been introduced before the ballot so that TC members can express strong concerns about a specific nomination. The details of the full process will be circulated to the whole TC at some point in June, after discussion within the subcommittee.
 

 

 

6. Elections

Yan Sun has been appointed as the new Chair of the subcommittee.

While the TC has a good industry/academic balance, it could improve regarding gender and area coverage. The subcommittee will liaise with the MMSP TC to get access and adapt the Excel spreadsheet that they are using for elections.
 

 

7. Education & Tutorial

 

Yun-Qing Shi has been appointed as the new Chair of the subcommittee.

M. Wu reports that there is no IFS-related tutorial yet on the new SPS online platform (slides+speech). For increased visibility in the Society, it is important that our technical community engages with this new initiative, possibly by involving the Distinguished Lecturers that were successfully nominated by the TC over the past few years. Tutorials given at WIFS could also be a good target.

There has not been a SPS-sponsored IFS Seasonal School yet too. Although the selection process is getting increasingly competitive, TC members are encouraged to come forward with proposals, possibly back-to-back with WIFS.

The SP Cup is another educational initiative that the TC may want to participate to.
All in all, the Technical Committee is encouraged to come up with proposals/initiatives that promotes the interactions toward students. Another example, for instance, was the student luncheon at ICASSP this year.
 

 

8. Industry

 

Shantanu Rane has been appointed as the new Chair of the subcommittee.

SPS is still discussing the opportunity to create a Standard Standing Committee. There is a feeling that there have been some missed opportunities in the past. For instance, IEEE recently launched a standardization effort for subjective evaluation of stereo video content. However, due to a lack of clear entity in SPS, this initiative has been attached to the Computer Society. In a first step, the Society is in the process of inventorying all the standard activities in which SPS members are involved. They will then decide on the scope of what could be a Standards SC within SPS. The industry subcommittee will be charge of polling the IFS community for inputs.

G. Doërr reports on the Ambassador Program, an initiative recently launched by IEEE SPS Industrial Relations Committee. The feeling is that IEEE SPS conferences have drifted too far on the scientific side. The representatives from industry now largely reduce to a collection of individuals from research labs of big corporations. As a result, we no longer see signal processing practitioner (application engineers, start-ups, etc) attending SPS events. The Society is in the process of investigating how to fill the gap between this academic world and the industry. The Ambassador Program is intended to survey the expectations of the different parties and to come up with a number of practical initiatives. Knowing that SPS legacy big events are unlikely to be severely reworked, the objective is to make the new ESPA conference more successful.

Finally, G. Doërr points out that the subcommittee needs to make efforts to attract the interest of new companies. IEEE WIFS had the chance so far to be financially supported by a number of industry grants, but they mostly originate from watermarking companies (Civolution, Digimarc, Technicolor) or governmental bodies (EOARD). For long term sustainability, it is necessary to diversify our sources of support.
 

 

9. Website

 

Patrick Bas has been appointed as the new Chair of the subcommittee.

G. Doërr reports that the main structure of the IFS website is up and running but that it needs inputs from the IFS community to remain lively, e.g. news for the message board, openings for the jobs marketplace, and datasets/code for the resources repository. A major objective this year is to make a better use of social platforms e.g. LinkedIn. This is based on two observations (i) it is likely that more people check their LinkedIn wall rather than the IFS page, and (ii) newcomers are more likely to join a group recommended by a connection on LinkedIn.

S. Rane reminds the recurring issue of WIFS’ websites being hacked or lost. The subcommittee will put together a proposal (including budget for domain name and hosting) to have a dedicated separate website managed by the IFS TC. It is anticipated to provide a single access point to get to IFS events, e.g. WIFS, contests, seasonal schools, etc.
 

 

10. Technical directions

 

Teddy Furon has been appointed as the new Chair of the subcommittee.
 

 

11. Next Meeting

 

The next TC meeting will be held in Guangzhou, China, during WIFS 2013 (November 18-21, 2013).

 

The meeting was adjourned at 14:20 without objection.

 

 

 

WIFS 2012 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Monday 3 December 2012, 12:30 – 14:00 PM, WIFS 2012, Tenerife, Spain

Minutes prepared by Gwenaël Doërr, Min Wu and Mauro Barni.

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: M. Wu, M. Barni, T. Furon, P. Bas, J. Huang, S. Voloshynovskiy, P. Campisi, A. Rocha, F. Perez-Gonzalez, G. Doërr, A. Piva, J. Fridrich, S. Rane (via skype), R. Merker (on behalf of J. Dittmann)

Guests: P. Comesana, A. Ker

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. The meeting started at 12:30pm.

 

 

2. WIFS’12

The workshop was jointly organized by the University of Vigo and the University of Laguna. 94 people registered to attend the conference which maintains a ratio attendees/papers of 2, relatively high compared to other SPS conference and in line with previous editions of WIFS. The workshop attracted more than $20k in financial support from various corporate, institutional, and governmental entities. This resulted in a 30% surplus with respect to the regular financial forecast. The organization committee therefore decided to fund a best paper award and a best student paper award. The potential impact of various social networking sites to better communicate with the community has been highlighted.

WIFS’12 attracted a record number of 160 submissions which clearly demonstrates the built-up of WIFS’ reputation. Each paper has been reviewed by at least 3 reviewers and most of the time 4. The acceptance rate was 30% which is within historical figures. To accommodate for the increase of accepted papers, 2 poster sessions were introduced for the first time in the technical programme of WIFS. 3 awards will be presented during the banquet: 2 funded by the conference and 1 funded by the European project REWIND.

 

 

3. WIFS’13

WIFS’ subcommittee received this year a single proposal to organize WIFS’13. After a number of review rounds to improve the proposal, the whole TC voted by email in September. The result of the ballot was positive and WIFS’13 will therefore be held in Guangzhou, China and organized by J. Huang and T. Kalker.

The progress so far included: building the program committee, drafting and circulating call for paper, setting up the website, selecting the reviewing system, finalizing the preliminary budget, etc. There were still a number of pending items e.g. opening the concentration bank account and securing the conference venue.

The latter one actually had to be postponed after learning that GlobalSIP’13 in Austin, TX, whose dates were recently decided, was in direct conflict with WIFS’13. After a short discussion, the TC members agreed to shift the dates of WIFS’13 to avoid such conflict, while also avoiding Thanksgiving vacation in the USA. A short poll was conducted during the banquet to get feedback from the community and it has been agreed to move WIFS’13 one week earlier.

 

 

4. WIFS and new SPS conferences

SPS eventually decided to hold GlobalSIP in the November/December period. The TC will explore the opportunity to pair up GlobalSIP and WIFS, when WIFS is expected to be held in the USA according to our informal rotation schedule. This will be typically the case in 2014. The benefit for the IFS TC would be essentially to lighten the load with respect to cost, finances, and organization.

Attending TC members raised a number of concerns/suggestions and the TC Chair will liaise with GlobalSIP to get further information.

 

 

5. EDICS updates for ICASSP/ICIP

The new IFS EDICS have been accepted for ICASSP.

The IFS EDICS for ICIP were currently being discussed to replace the old 3.5 COM-WSE. They were derived from the ICASSP EDICS by removing all items that were not related to image/video/visual processing. EDICS related to video-surveillance and biometrics had to be revisited to account for already well-established tracks at ICIP (6.ARS and 6.4 ARS-BIM).

 

 

6. Elevator SPS publication scheme

The IEEE Signal Processing Letters recently launched a new initiative. Authors who have published in IEEE SPL over the last year can apply to present their papers at ICASSP and ICIP. The manuscript will not be published a second time in the proceedings of the conference. The full process is yet to be finalized and the first test trial will take place during ICASSP 2013.

This paradigm is likely to be extended to all IEEE SPS Transactions for ChinaSIP and GlobalSIP.

 

 

7. IFS Forensics Challenge

A. Piva, A. Rocha, and J. Huang will run the first IFS Challenge in 2013.
The challenge will consist of two phases. The first phase (2 months) will be dedicated to image tampering detection; the second phase (3 months) will focus on tampering localization. The 700 forgeries will be produced by students from A. Rocha and J. Huang research teams.

The challenge is planned to start after ICASSP and to stop before WIFS, where the winner of the challenge will be announced. The organizers anticipate $10k financial support from IEEE SPS and the European project REWIND. The objective is to fund travel grants for the 2 runner-ups of the challenge as well as the best forger (5 people total). REWIND partners and members of the organization committee will not be eligible to win the challenge.

The website subcommittee will soon add a link from the SPS IFS web page.
IEEE SPS is reluctant to pay for servers that would host the website of the challenge. The inclination of the Society is to privilege solutions relying on hosting services in the cloud. The website subcommittee will investigate what would be the cost of such online services to host all IFS websites, including WIFS, challenges, summer schools, etc.

 

 

8. Elections

There were two candidates running for the position of Vice Chair this year: G. Doërr and F. Perez-Gonzalez. G. Doërr has been elected as Vice Chair of the IFS TC for 2013 and will become the Chair during 2014-2015 according to the bylaws of the TC. 11 new members were also elected this year using the new TC voting rule (approval + preferential).

M. Barni, who is retiring, has been recently appointed IEEE-SPS Regional Director for Region 8.

Greater care should be taken in the upcoming year on the balance of the IFS TC, including area coverage, geographical coverage, gender diversity, junior/senior diversity, etc. The TC will liaise with the MMSP TC. They are using an Excel template to provide a snapshot of the TC and help TC members appreciating the impact of their vote.

 

 

9. Awards

The TC endorsed this year the candidature of Mauro Barni as a Distinguished Lecturer. The TC Chair was glad to announce that he had been selected by the Society for 2013-2014.

The IFS TC also endorsed 3 nominations this year:

 

• Yagiz Sutcu, Qiming Li, and Nasir Memon, "Protecting Biometric Templates With Sketch: Theory and Practice" for the IEEE SPS Best Paper award;
• Hany Farid, "Image Forgery Detection: A Survey" for the IEEE Best SPM Paper award;
• Weiqi Luo (young author), Fangjun Huang and Jiwu Huang, "Edge adaptive image steganography based on LSB matching revisited" for the IEEE Young Author Best Paper Award.

 

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In 2013, the Awards Subcommittee will revisit the IFS endorsement process (i) to make a better use of the Area Chairs and (ii) to make the nomination/endorsement process more open in accordance with the new IEEE SPS bylaws.

 

 

 

10. ChinaSIP

The first edition of ChinaSIP will take place in July 2013 in Beijing, China. Both M. Wu and J. Huang are involved in the organization of the conference and will provide the IFS TC with fresh news as they come in.

 

 

11. Website

This year, a resources section has been introduced on the IFS web page.TC members were encouraged to send their input to enrich this section. All TC members were also reminded to provide fresh inputs to keep the job marketplace and the message board lively.

Next year, the subcommittee will investigate if it makes sense to engage on popular social platforms.

 

 

12. Educational activities

No Seasonal School has been organized by the IFS TC so far. The procedure is now in place and TC members were encouraged to put up a proposal, e.g. back-to-back with WIFS.

The IFS TC should also explore how to get involved in the SP Cup in the future. The SP Cup is geared towards students rather than researchers compared to the IFS challenge.

SPS is making great efforts to put a number of tutorials online for educational purpose. IFS TC members were encouraged to audio or video tape their presentation when they are doing a tutorial.

 

 

13. SigPort

SPS launched a new initiative to set in place a technical report repository. The idea is to have something similar to arxiv, hosted by IEEE, and tailored for the SPS needs. To guarantee sustainability, SPS envision a publication fee of $10 per page for technical reports and a low flat rate for PhD thesis.

This is currently in shaping process and any input is welcome.

 

 

14. Mailing list for retired members

A mailing list has been put in place for retired members.

 

 

15. Next Meeting

The next TC meeting will be held in Vancouver, Canada, during ICASSP 2013 (May 26-31, 2013).

The meeting was adjourned at 14:20 without objection.

 

 

 

ICASSP 2012 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Friday 30 March 2012, 12:30 – 14:20 PM, ICASSP 2012, Kyoto, Japan

Minutes prepared by Y. Sun, V. Zhao, and M. Wu.

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: M. Wu, M. Barni, T. Furon, P. Bas, J. Huang, J. Kuo, M. Liao, G. Sharma, Y. Shi, Y. Sun, V. Zhao, A. Kot, D. Florencio (via skype), S. Rane (via skype)

Guests: C. Zhang

 

 

 

1. M. Wu called for the meeting at 12:30pm.

 

 

2. TC Status Report

M. Wu reported the current status of the TC, summarizing the main achievements since last meeting in Foz do Iguacu, Brazil.

1. M. Wu reported that EDICS updates of IFS areas for ICASSP are currently under SPS Conference Board review, and will be adopted for ICASSP 2013. TIFS EDICS has been updated. Similar updates are planned for ICIP (by removing items in the new EDICS that are not relevant to ICIP such as primarily network/communication security). G. Sharma will also share his suggestion from serving as the ICIP’12 TPC Chair.
2. M. Wu reported the new composition of TC subcommittees after the election of new members and retirement of past members. All subcommittees are in place.
3. S. Rane reported that the TC member webpage has been updated, and the subcommittee webpage will be updated soon.

 

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3. WIFS 2012 Progress Report
 

 

 

 

 

1. WIFS 2012 Progress Report:
   
   1. WIFS 2012 OC has sent call-for-papers emails to many people in various topic communities and encourage them to submit papers. SPS will broadcast the call-for-papers to SPS members in about 10 days. TC members are encouraged to submit papers and support WIFS 2012. There were also discussions of SPS email broadcast to better advertise WIFS 2012. Currently, SPS has strict rules about the frequency and time framework of email broadcasts, which may not fit our needs. Wu will explore with SPS staff.
   2. WIFS 2012 OC has also set up social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. TC members are encouraged to follow WIFS 2012 on these social media.
   3. WIFS 2012 will use EasyChair for paper review.
   4. TC members are encouraged to suggest topics and potential speakers for tutorials at WIFS 2012.

    

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2. WIFS 2011 Report
   
   1. WIFS’11 had a 44% surplus including $15000 from industrial/external grants. Without this $15K grant, the surplus was 22%. There were questions/discussions about whether this big surplus could be used for our TC.
   2. Kuo reported that diversity in topics could be further improved.  For some topics, WIFS 2011 received only a few papers.  The TC need to make continued effort to encourage researchers in IFS area to come to WIFS, and have a minimal coverage for each main topic. The goal is to make ICASSP or WIFS or both as major gathering events for IFS researchers.

    

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3. Proposals for WIFS 2013 will be due in June, and we may expect one in Guangzhou, China.

 

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4. ICASSP 2012

In ICASSP 2012, there were 79 submissions in IFS area, and 38 papers were accepted in two oral and three poster sessions. It was noted that MMSP TC also had an oral session on security/authentication with 5 papers. The TC may explore coordination with MMSP TC in future ICASSP/ICIP technical program organization.

 

 

5. The 5th page in ICASSP papers

M. Wu reported and led the discussion on the new 5th-page initiative proposed by ICASSP 2013. In ICASSP 2013, each submitted paper is allowed up to 4 pages for technical content including figures and possible references, and an optional 5th page for references only. The purpose is to enable authors to give more complete and proper literature review and to credit prior work, which may also help improve the citation number of SPS papers and allow them for a fair comparison with other fields that have longer page limit and more extensive reference citations. There were comments that we should do it to give authors the room to provide better literature survey and to improve the quality of the paper, but we should not do it just to increase the citation number. There were also concerns, most of which were about the potential abuse of the 5th page.

 

 

6. GlobalSIP and ChinaSIP

Min introduced and led the discussions on two major society-level conference initiatives, GlobalSIP and ChinaSIP.

1. It was noted that many of recent ICASSP/ICIP were outside North America and had fewer attendees from North America. To help SPS have two major gathering events per year, a new initiative GlobalSIP is introduced, which will be similar to GlobeCom sponsored by ComSoc. It will be symposium-based annual fall meeting initially in U.S. Each TC can choose to offer a symposium track, and has the option to make their annual workshop co-located with GlobalSIP if they wish. Compared to workshops independently run by different TCs, GlobalSIP may help offer better venue, reduce the management overhead (in cost and manpower) and attract more attendees. There were concerns whether it will increase the TC review load. Wu commented that the TC can choose to have their annual workshop co-located with the GlobalSIP, and also has the option not to join GlobalSIP on particular years; so it does not necessarily increase the review workload.  There are also concerns whether TCs lose their flexibility and freedom in the selection of the location and organizing team of their workshops. Wu commented that there is no obligation to join GlobalSIP, and the TC can decide what is the best, and consider GlobalSIP as an extra option.
2. Another new initiative ChinaSIP, an annual symposium-based conference held in China, is to encourage outreach to China and get more Chinese researchers, especially students, be involved in SPS. IEEE and SPS recognize China as the top outreach area. We see more and more Chinese researchers are involved in SPS activities. However, many Chinese researchers and students have difficulties coming to SPS conferences due to various reasons, e.g., visa problem; there is also a need to foster community building for SPS related professionals and a ladder for them to reach the global stage. TC members are invited to participate in their TIGs and OCs. Other sister societies have taken actions in this direction. For example, the first ICC in China will be held in Beijing in August 2012, which is sponsored by ComSoc. Concerns were raised regarding the extra work load for TC members. M. Wu commented that each TC can decide how much they want to be involved. There were also discussions on the quality control and sustainability of ChinaSIP.

 

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7. Award and DL nomination

J. Kuo is chairing the award nomination subcommittee, and in his EiC role for T-IFS, this also helps the TC to coordinate with the T-IFS editorial board. More details will be sent to the TC after the Award Board opens nomination and announced details in the coming months.

 

 

8. Updates on TC Challenge and SP Cup

M. Wu reported that our TC submitted a proposal on image forensics to SP Cup, which was ranked top. Wu commented that at the TC level, we need to propose a rough budget, the award money and preferred timeline.

 

 

9. IFS-related Tutorial

M. Wu commented that we should promote IFS-related tutorials online, for example, IFS-related distinguished lecture talks, WIFS tutorials, and/or seasonal schools. Video is optional, while audio plus sides also work for now.

 

 

10. Next Meeting

The next TC meeting will be held in Tenerife, Spain, during WIFS 2012 (Dec. 2-5, 2012).

The meeting was adjourned at 14:20 without objection.

 

 

WIFS 2011 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Wednesday November 30, 2011, 19:00-20:20 (GMT-2)

In Foz do Iguacu, Brazil

Prepared by Min Wu and Mauro Barni

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members:: (WIFS organizers) Dinei Florencio, Nasir Memon, Jay Kuo, Mauro Barni, Fernando Perez-Gonzalez, Gwenaël Doërr, Shantanu Rane, and a few more.

Skype: Min Wu.

Guests: (WIFS organizers) Anderson Rocha, Hari Kalva and Ricardo de Queiroz.

 

 

1. M. Barni called for the meeting at 19:00 (GMT-2)

 

 

2. Roundtable for introductions

 

 

3. Report on TC Review during ICASSP 2011:

 

M. Barni briefed the TC on the SPS TC review for our TC during ICASSP 2011. M. Barni and M. Wu participated in the review on behalf of the TC, and it went very well.  Our TC was praised for doing exemplary job on a number of aspects, especially on developing a successful workshop series, informative web pages, and attracting affiliate members from the community.
 

 

The review committee gave a few constructive feedbacks for our TC to reflect and improve. These include the procedures and timing for TC-level award nomination and endorsement. In particular, award nomination should be open to the community; TC subcommittees and track chairs can be encouraged to proactively identify worthy papers and individuals and encourage nominations, but the nomination process should be open and are not limited to those identified by the subcommittees.
 

The expertise gap between current members and ICASSP/ICIP/WIFS topic areas were also discussed, and the TC was encouraged to utilize associate membership to fill in the gap.  The needs of EDICS updates for IFS related topics at ICASSP and ICIP were also mentioned, and our TC was encouraged to carry out this update to reflect the broadened scope of the IFS areas and also coordinate with other TCs that have some topic overlap with ours.

 

 

4. WIFS 2011 Report

 

 

WIFS 2011 was very successful. The Organizing Team made a strong effort to coordinate with the Brazilian Police Force (which is in preparations to ensure security for the future World Cup and Olympic Games) and co-locate with Brazilian police force events that were independently managed from ours.
 

WIFS Technical Co-Chair J. Kuo reported that the technical program received 123 paper submissions, 40 papers were accepted. There are 110 attendees at this WIFS, whereby the tutorials are included in the regular registration.  Technical sessions and tutorials have been well attended. WIFS attracted funding support to offer substantial Student Travel Award (2 Gold awards at $2000 each, 2 Silver Awards at $1000 each).
 

WIFS General Co-Chair D. Florencio also reported two industry grants of $10K total have also been approved by the companies but are still in the process of processing payment due to various delays beyond control.  This may lead to a high surplus for the conference, and the organizing team would wish to be able to apply the fund to support next year’s WIFS.  This may need to consultation and approval from SPS Conference Board.

 

 

5. WIFS 2012 Report (to be held next year)

 

 

Next WIFS’s General Chair F. Perez-Gonzalez reported the progress for WIFS 2012.  This will be held in Tenerife, the beautiful Spanish Canary Islands.  Social network features are being explored to connect with the IFS community and potential authors.

 

 

6. On-going effort

 

-    Web page update; provide job marketplace information as part of effort from SPS Technical Direction Board and Industry Service Committee.

-    Updates on subcommittee (to reflect the newly elected members and retiring members).

-    WIFS 2013 proposal:  encourage more TC members to be active in giving feedbacks.

-    IFS community building and growth
 

 

 

 

7. Next meeting

 

 

The next TC meeting will be held in Kyoto, Japan, during ICASSP 2012 (March 25-30, 2015).
The meeting was adjourned at 20:20 without objection.

 

 

ICASSP 2011 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Tuesday 24 May, 20:00-22:30, ICASSP 2011, Prague, Czech Republic

Minutes prepared by Min Wu and Mauro Barni.

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: M. Barni, G. Doërr, C.-C. Jay Kuo, S. Voloshynovskiy, W. Zeng, P. Campisi, T. Furon, A. Piva, S. Rane, G. Sharma, H. Vicky Zhao, J. Allebach (teleconference), M. Wu (second half of the meeting)

Ex-officio members: A. Tewfik (VP Technical Directions)

IFS-TC Associate members: D. Florencio

Guests: P. Moulin, T. Kalker, I. Acivbas

 

 

 

1. M. Barni called for the meeting at 20:00.

 

 

2. TC Status Report

Barni reported the current state of the TC summarizing the main achievements since last meeting in Seattle.

1. The web site has been expanded thanks to the efforts of the web site subcom. G. Doerr gave a detailed report on the news included in the web site and invited all the TC members to populate the site with particular reference to news to be posted on the message board and job offers for the job market-place.
2. M. Barni reported about the new composition of TC subcoms after the election of new members. All the subcoms are now numerous enough to carry out the tasks assigned to them.
3. M. Barni reported about the establishment of Interest areas and the corresponding area chairs. The current list of interest areas and area chairs is as follows:
   • Data hiding (steganography, steganalysis, watermarking). Chair: F. Perez-Gonzalez
   • Multimedia security (robust hashing, DRM, multimedia forensics). Chair: G. Doërr
   • Signal processing and cryptography (secure signal processing, multimedia encryption, privacy protection). Chair: S. Katzenbeisser
   • Network security. Chair: W. Trappe
   • Biometric security. Chair: P. Campisi
   • Video-surveillance. Chair: M. Liao
   • Information theoretic aspects of security. Chair: tbd
   • Applications and systems (including emerging issues like security issues in cloud computing, smart grids, social networks). Chair: J. Kuo

    

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4. M. Barni reviewed the current composition of the TC that now consists of 32 regular members, 2 associate members and 45 affiliate members. J. Kuo suggested that retired members of the TC could be invited as associate members. It is agreed that the TC chair will invited those among retired members that were more active within the TC during their term.

 

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3. Distinguished Lecturer nominations

Barni announced the results of the DL nomination ballot. As a result of the ballot the nominations of T. Kalker and P. Moulin have been approved and will be forwarded to the  SPS award committee.

 

 

4. WIFS 2011

D. Florencio gave report on the status of the organization of WIFS 2011. The following major points were clarified:

• TC members were reminded that one of the pro’s of holding WIFS 2011 in Brasil was that in the same days the ICMedia (International Conference on Multimedia Forensics, Surveillance and Security) event organized by the DPF (Departimento de Policia federal) is held, thus creating opportunities for interesting synergies. For the same reason DPF promised to sponsor WIFS’11 at a significant level. Concerns were expressed by G. Doerr and M. Barni regarding the fact that the organization of ICMedia seems to be quite late. Florencio reassured the TC that even if the ICmedia event has not been advertised yet (and the contract between ICMedia organizers and DPF not signed), it is pretty sure that such an event will take place in concomitance with WIFS. It is then agreed to mention ICMedia when advertising WIFS 2011.
• J. Kuo reported about the web site submission system, that is ready to be put on-line after a last double check.
• J. Kuo said that keynote speakers have already been defined. They are: T. Kalker, P. Flynn, and W. Horn. The name of keynote speakers will be made public as soon as the title of the talks will be available.
• Six tutorial proposal have been received. The organizing committee plans to accept 3 of them.

 

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5. WIFS 2012

G. Doerr reported about the call for proposals for WIFS. At least two such proposals should be submitted. Barni raised the issue of a possible date change of WIFS 2012 that could be held in early September instead of late November/December. A long discussion followed, during which the pros and cons of holding WIFS in September were highlighted. Among the pros the most important ones TC members mentioned: less academic duties with respect to December, better weather conditions in most parts of the world. Among the cons, the necessity of staying away from ICIP, and the large number of conferences and workshop already organized in September were mentioned. The proposal of holding WIFS in January was also advanced. At the end of the discussion it was clear to everybody that no ideal solution exists, so it is suggested that a poll is carried out among TC members (regular, associate and affiliate) to gather additional information. The poll is going to be run by the WIFS subcom of the TC.

Another related issue that was discussed is the possibility of merging WIFS with other conferences/workshops roughly covering the same topics. Some members expressed the opinion that the TC should seriously consider this possibility since a number of security-oriented conferences are facing a hard time in attracting a sufficient number of good submissions, and merging could help to solve this problem. Others observed that WIFS is not experiencing this difficulty and hence there’s no need for a merge from WIFS’s side. It was also noted that we should let WIFS grow and consolidate its reputation before thinking about a merge. Finally the problem of loosing control over WIFS in case of a merge was raised.

 

 

6. Number of submission to ICASSP.

Barni reported about the number of papers submitted to ICASSP 2011 under the IFS-­Track. He noticed how such number decreased with respect to previous editions, and suggested that the TC should take some actions to cope with this problem. Barni recalled that, during the TC meeting in Seattle (December 2010, WIFS), it was suggested that the TC explores with the Society leadership for a notion of "IFS Track at ICASSP". The track was intended to increase the appealing of ICASSP outside the SP community. Several participants including A. Tewfik and T. Kalker noted that even with such an effort it is unlikely that (at least in the short term) researchers not belonging to the SP community will ever consider ICASSP as a premier venue for them, hence establishing and IFS track as proposed is likely to be a useless effort. They suggest that it would be a more effective strategy to devote outreach effort in growing WIFS first. After a thorough discussion it is decided that priority should be given to attract new submissions (especially from outside the SP community) to WIFS that is likely to be in a better position to attract external researchers. In a second phase, some attendants of WIFS will eventually be invited to attend ICASSP as well.

As to ICASSP, it was decided to make an effort to increase the participation among SP researchers. Barni observed that the EDICS of the IFS-TC used for ICASSP should be updated. Doerr confirmed this necessity by commenting on the fact that this year there were some IFS-relevant papers that were published in other areas (e.g. MMSP P1 & P3 where *5* watermarking posters were presented in total). M. Wu observed that a similar effort is being carried  out in parallel by TIFS EDICS. A small working group is then formed to liaise with TIFS EB and come out with a new version of TC EDICS to be approved before the end of June so to be adopted by next ICASSP. The working group is formed by:  A.  Piva, J. Kuo and N. Memon. As a final note, Barni invited all TC members to submit their paper to ICASSP starting from next edition.

 

 

7. TC balance.

M. Barni expressed his concern that some areas relevant to the TC’s scope are not adequately represented within the TC. It is suggest that two lines of actions are undertaken to face with this problem:

• Pay attention to technical coverage during the next election of new members. The nomination  and election process should be carried out in such a way that a good balance among  technical areas, as well as among geographical areas, is reached. Zhao suggested that the election subcom considers the possibility of using a tool like the one adopted for the election procedure within the MMSP TC.
• Appoint associate members covering the under-represented areas. It is noted in fact that it is likely to be easier to involve personalities outside the SP community as associate  rather then as regular members. The same should be done to reach a better coverage of geographical areas and  to liaise with industry.

 

 

 

8. IFS competition.

Barni led the discussion regarding the opportunity of organizing a  challenge (competition) on an IFS theme. Such an opportunity would fit will with the idea launched by SPS to organize one or more SP cups. Everybody agreed that this is a good idea. Different opinions are expressed about the audience that should be targeted  by the competition. A. Tewfik recommended that he competition be directed to researchers. M. Wu noticed that the SP cup is likely to be more oriented towards undergraduate students and suggested that the IFS competition is organized in such a way to address both researchers and undergraduate students. With regard to the possible topic(s) addressed by the competition, Barni recommended that the TC organize the competition in an area where it has a good reputation, so that the competition is scientifically credible. Several  proposals are made including: image forensics, biometrics, smart grid security. At the end of the discussion it is decided that M. Barni will  raise this issue via e-mail so to gather more reactions and be ready to submit a proposal to SP technical direction board before the Summer.

 

 

9. Next meeting.

The next TC meeting will be held  in Foz Do Iguacu, Brazil, during WIFS 2011 (29 November – 2 December 2011).

The meeting was adjourned without objection

 

 

 

WIFS 2010 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

Tuesday 14 December, 12:30 - 1:15 pm and 5:15 - 6:25 pm, WIFS 2010, Kirkland, WA, USA

Minutes prepared by Min Wu and Mauro Barni.

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC voting members: M. Barni, G. Doërr, J. Fridrich, S. Katzenbeisser, D. Kirovski, N. Memon, M. Wu

IFS-TC new members effective 2011: P. Campisi, T. Furon, S. Rane

IFS-TC Associate members: D. Florencio (Microsoft research, WIFS Technical Co-Chair)

 

 

 

1. M. Barni called for the meeting at 12:30pm.

 

 

2. TC Status Report

Barni reported the current state of the TC. Overall, major subcommittees are in place and operating in good pace. He summarized the TC’s status and major progress in several areas:
 

• Membership subcommittee conducted new member election and Vice Chair election. Nine new members were elected. This addition brings the TC size to a steady state of around 30 members in 2011. Thus starting from 2011, about one third of the members will retire each year and new members elected.
• Min Wu was elected as Vice Chair. The TC leadership structure now complies with the new SPS TC bylaw guideline, which removed the TC Secretary position and put in a 2-year Vice Chair position who will then become the TC Chair.
• The TC website is operating and up-to-date, thanks to effort by Doërr and Zhao.
• The TC has successfully nominated the first Distinguished Lecturer, Nasir Memon, for 2011-2012. It was discussed that the TC will continue the effort to nominate strong candidates in IFS areas.
• WIFS 2010 was successfully held. More details are discussed in item#3 by Barni and the Workshop Chairs.
• WIFS 2011 organizing team and location have been decided. The TC voted to approve the proposal to host WIFS 2011 in Iguaçu Falls, Brazil, in November 2011. The organizing team of WIFS 2011 was able to give a brief welcome presentation to WIFS 2010 attendees and distribute a Call-for-Papers. In addition, there are multiple teams that have shown interests to bid for WIFS 2012. It was anticipated that the selection of WIFS 2012 will be done in a bit earlier time frame than this year, and be decided and announced during WIFS 2011. The good prospect of WIFS 2011 and 2012 is a significant progress showing that this new Workshop series is getting into a steady state.

 

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3. WIFS 2010

Barni and Workshop Chairs Kirovski, Florencio, and Memon gave reports on WIFS 2010. Many aspects of the workshop have shown very encouraging progress, considering this is only the 2nd edition of a new workshop.

Despite being put together within a very short period time early this year, the Workshop has received a very good amount of submission and attendance. About 130 papers were submitted, out of which 39 papers were accepted to a single oral track; the acceptance rate is 28%. The competitive acceptance rate did not affect the attendance: about 100 people registered, including a good number of industry colleagues. This 2.5:1 ratio of attendees to accepted papers is very competitive among SPS workshops. There is not a single no-show.

Topic areas of the papers as well as the background of attendees are quite diverse: in addition to the traditionally strong areas on multimedia security such as watermarking, steganography, and image forensics, the workshop has attracted work and people from hardware security areas, biometrics, network/communication security, and applied cryptography. Two keynote talks were well attended and received.

The Workshop received strong industrial support from Microsoft, Boeing, Technicolor, and Digimarc.

It was suggested that the website subcommittee work with the past WIFS organizers to archive the e-version of the conference program booklets on the TC website.

 

 

4. Work Plan and Areas to Improve in 2011

Barni led the discussions on areas to be worked on for 2011.
 

• Award nomination and endorsement: Based on issues arising from this and previous years, it was noted that the procedures need clarification and improvement. The new TC Policy & Procedure will address this (see item#5 below).

  Meeting attendees also brainstormed possible ways to increase more nominations, especially for paper awards. For example, to be more proactive and develop some mechanism to build a list when seeing good papers during the year instead of waiting till the short nomination period; to bring potential papers to the TC members’ attention using citation counts (while keeping in mind the limitations of such metrics); etc.

• Affiliate and Associate Members: Meeting attendees discussed what the TC may expect from each of these two groups of non-voting members and how to engage them.

  General involvement and policies for these two groups are described in the new TC Bylaws and Policy & Procedures. It was suggested that emails of call-for-nominations for awards, Distinguished Lecturers, and new member elections will be sent to these nonvoting members.

  At a given year, General and Technical Chairs of the previous year’s and future years’ WIFS will be invited as Associate Members and invited to attend TC meetings. The TC may review the involvement of Associate Members in the coming years and consider later how the TC may engage the AEs of T-IFS. It was suggested that the email discussions of TC matters will be sent to Associate Members and encourage them to participate in the discussion, although they will not vote during the voting stage.

• TC members also discussed potential activities and areas of development for industry and education subcommittees, such as help mentor students and junior colleagues’ career development. Doërr discussed TC’s participation in the SP Job Marketplace initiative organized by the SPS industry membership committee.
• Florencio brought to the TC’s attention of the IFS related track in ICME. The TC will explore a process on how to participate, such as help with paper reviews, etc.
• Barni led discussions on how to boost the ICASSP submissions and where to host TC meetings that have a good potential to reach a quorum. It was suggested that the TC explores with the Society leadership for a notion of “IFS Track at ICASSP”: it is intended to retain the current paper review and organization logistics, and provide a more appealing names to the broad IFS community (than the ICASSP names that may not be appeal to IFS people with less a signal processing focus), and encourage more to submit IFS related papers to and attend ICASSP. Impact on WIFS will also need to be considered.

  The TC will continue to host meetings at ICASSP and WIFS, and will explore the feasibility for providing call-in option for members who cannot attend the meeting.

• Barni led a discussion on the idea of organizing some challenge/contest on suitable IFS topics of interests. The intent is to increase TC’s visibility, advance the state-of-the-art, and engage the IFS community; this kind of activities not only fits very well with the nature of many IFS problems, but also is in line with some visibility/outreach ideas discussed at the Society-level long range planning. Active discussions were carried out regarding the topics, the level/nature of the challenge, the development of the challenge, the required level of resources (funding, hosting facilities, man power, etc), etc. It was agreed that the TC will look into more details of this potential activity in the coming year.
• Other items to work on for 2011 includes updating EDICS and TC review by the Society during ICASSP 2011. Barni will coordinate these efforts.

 

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5. New TC Bylaws

Wu led the discussion on a working draft of the new TC Bylaw and Policy & Procedure (P&P) that were sent to the TC for review before this meeting. This effort is to make the TC Bylaw and P&P to be consistent with the Society’s new Bylaws and P&P on TC operations.

Major updates compared to the old TC documents include:

(1) the bylaw part has been made succinct and many details of procedural/policy nature have been moved into the P&P part;

(2) award nomination and endorsement policy and procedure have been updated and clarified, especially to address issues and confusions arising from past nominations;

and (3) member election procedure has been updated and clarified.

It was agreed on that after incorporating minor clarifications and suggestions made in the meeting and by email, the new TC Bylaw and P&P are sent to the TC for a vote. The Bylaws require 2/3 approval of all members with voting rights, while the P&P requires simple majority approval.

 

 

6. Next meeting

The next TC meeting will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, during the ICASSP 2011 in May 2011.

The meeting was adjourned without objection.

 

 

 

ICASSP 2010 IFS-TC Meeting Minutes

 

 

17 March 2010, 7:00 - 8:30, ICASSP 2010, Dallas, TX

Minutes prepared by Mauro Barni and Min Wu.

 

 

Participants

IFS-TC members: M. Barni, M. Wu, G. Doërr, J. Fridrich, F. Perez-González, G. Sharma, H. V. Zhao

Invited guests: D. Florencio (Microsoft research), Y. Sun (Univ. Rhode Island)

 

 

1. M. Barni called for the meeting at 7:05AM.  Role calls for the attendants to introduce themselves.

 

 

2. TC Membership Plan

Barni communicated the plans regarding the election of new members for the next years.
The TC currently has 24 voting members, and one member (the Past Chair) will retire by the end of 2010.

According to the Bylaws, 7 slots will be available for election of new members with term starting in 2011.

In this way, the TC will reach a steady state with about one third of the members retiring each year, for a whole cycle to be completed every 3 years.

 

 

3. WIFS 2010

The organizational status of the WIFS workshop was reviewed. And the strategy for the advertising of the workshop was discussed.

It is suggested that authors of papers be asked to pay a full registration fee, and one such fee may cover more than one papers. This is consistent with the practice of other SPS conferences.

Information will continue to be passed from the organizers of WIFS 2009 to the organizers of WIFS 2010.

 

 

4. New TC Bylaws

M. Barni informed the TC members about the new master template of TC bylaws that have been approved by SPS.

The main differences between the new bylaws and the old ones were discussed in details. Among them particular attention is given to the following issues:

• Three kinds of memberships are available now: elected voting members, associate members, affiliate members. It was suggested that former IFS-TC members and WIFS organizers are considered for associate membership. It was also suggested to proactively invite possibly interested researchers to join the IFS-TC as affiliate member;
• According to the old bylaws, the TC did not have the vice-chair position who will serve as Chair-Elect.  This Vice Chair position was introduced in the new bylaws conforming to the new SPS policies.  In order to align the TC to the new bylaws, it is decided that by the end of 2010, an election of the vice-chair (playing the role of chair-elect) is held. The vice-chair term during such a transition period will last one year instead of two. A steady state will be reached with the election of the 2012-2013 vice-chair, and such election will be held by the end on 2011.

 

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5. TC subcommittees

M. Barni communicated the plan to set up a few subcommittees to help engage TC members in running the TC activities.  The first subcommittees to be created are as follows.  Members will be contacted shortly for serving on one or  more of such committees.

• Awards subcommittee: to handle the nomination and endorsement for awards and distinguished lecturers;
• Nomination and election subcommittee: to handle the nomination of new members and vice-chair and the ballot;
• Bylaws subcommittee: to revise the TC bylaws and harmonize them with the new SPS bylaws;
• Web-site subcommittee: to manage the TC web-site;
• WIFS subcommittee: to handle the call or proposals for WIFS workshop and the voting process among the submitted proposals.

 

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6. Next meeting

The next TC meeting will be held in Seattle, during the WIFS 2010 workshop.
 

 

 

The meeting was adjourned without objection.