A Few Words from the IFS-TC

by Mauro Barni (IFS TC Chair)

The Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society promotes scientific and educational activities within the broad scope of multimedia security. Specific fields of interest include (but are not limited to) selective encryption for multimedia content, digital rights management, steganography and steganalysis, physically unclonable functions, biometrics security, digital watermarking, signal processing in the encrypted domain, robust hash functions, video surveillance and anomalous event detection, etc.

On December 13-16^th 2010, the IFS-TC held the second edition of its Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS). The event was hosted by Microsoft Research Labs within the premises of the Woodmark hotel in Seattle, WA, USA. The reputation of the workshop is growing steadily and is backed by an ever increasing quality of papers (acceptance rate: 28%). Moreover, WIFS’10 received notable industrial interest both through substantial financial support (Boeing Corp. and its Ed wells partnership, Microsoft Research, Technicolor, and Digimarc) and by industrial representatives attending the workshop (~30% of the audience at WIFS’10). The long-term goal of WIFS is to provide a stimulating venue for knowledge exchange that encompasses a broad range of disciplines exploring various aspects of information forensics and security, and that facilitates the exchange of ideas across communities and individuals whose regular research paths may not normally intersect. WIFS’11 will be hold in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, and co-located with the ICMedia meeting run by the Brazilian police which is intended to provide stimulating interactions with real-life forensics practitioners.

WIFS’10 has also been an opportunity for the IFS-TC to hold one of its plenary meetings and discuss the orientations of the TC for the upcoming year.

• A TC in running order. The IFS-TC reached this year its steady status with about 30 members elected for a 3-years long term, renewed by a third every year. The TC is currently updating its bylaws and procedures to comply with the recent updates of SPS and is also revisiting its EDICS to better capture relevant contributors.
• Enliven the IFS community. The TC discussed how to better involve interested individuals in the IFS community, in particular associate and affiliate members. The organization of challenges run by the IFS-TC is currently being contemplated as a means to favor interactions within the community. The TC is also investigating how to optimize the use of its website e.g. by providing a dynamic job marketplace and relevant resources (databases, source code).
• Promoting successful researchers. The TC reviewed several nomination strategies to successfully support selected individual pushed forward to the IEEE SPS Award Committee.

And finally, let me take this opportunity to wish you a happy new year on behalf of the whole IFS-TC.