Activity Update from the IFS-TC

Published in TC News on 1 February 2015

Contributed by Gwenaël Doërr and Patrick Bas

The mission of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/ifs-tc/) is to promote activities within the broad technical areas of information forensics and security.

Membership

As usual after the New Year, some members the Technical Committee have retired and a new batch of volunteers got in.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all retiring members for their continuous service over the years: Min Wu, Patrick Bas, Dinei Florencio, Anthony T.S. Hong, Jiwu Huang, Ching-Yung Lin, Anderson Rocha, Husrev T. Sencar, Yun Q. Shi, and Yan (Lindsay) Sun. On the other hand, it is our great pleasure to welcome our new members: Marc Chaumont, Ann Dooms, Erkin Zekeriya, Patrick J. Flynn, Xudong Jiang, Fernando Pérez-Gonzalez, Walter Scheirer, Avinash L. Varna, and Z. Jane Wang. We would also like to congratulate Wade Trappe who has been elected as the Vice Chair of the Technical Committee and who will take over when Gwenaël Doërr will retire at the end of the year. The election is becoming more competitive year after year and we encourage prospective members to engage in IFS initiatives to raise their visibility in the community.

In any case, IFS enthusiasts are invited to join the Technical Committee as Affiliate Members through the dedicated one-click web registration form http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/tcaffiliate/. Alternately, you may want to get in touch with the IFS TC through your preferred social network. One year after its launch, the IFS-TC has 100 members on LinkedIn and 45 friends on Facebook. Note that each message news coming from the IFS-TC is automatically redirected to the social networks.

Journals

The Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/forensics/ has been renewed. It is with great pleasure that we announce that Mauro Barni took over after C.C. Jay Kuo. Before retiring, Jay succeeded to further increase the reputation of the journal. The Journal Citation Reports, published by Thomson Reuters, recently gave an impact factor of 2.065 to T-IFS in 2013 (vs. 1.895 in 2012). It also ranks 58 (vs. 54 in 2012) among all journals in the category of “Engineering: Electrical and Electronic”. We know that the journal is in good hands and we wish the best successes to the editorial team.

On another front, the IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing is currently processing manuscripts submitted to a special issue on Signal and Information Processing for Privacy. Stay tuned for this special issue that is scheduled to be published in October 2015.

Conferences

In December, the members of the IFS TC had the opportunity to meet in Atlanta, Georgia, USA at the IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security http://www.ieeewifs.org/, our flagship workshop that has been hosted this year by GlobalSIP http://www.ieeeglobalsip.org/. This edition has been well attended and featured two keynote talks given by:

• Prof. Min Wu (University of Maryland, College Park) titled “Traces in the Environment: Exploring Power Network Signatures for Information Forensics”;
• and Prof. Wade Trappe (Rutgers University) titled “Security for Low End IoT Devices: When Energy is Not Enough, What is One to Do?”.

The workshop also featured tutorial presentations on “Securing the Internet of Things” and “Differential Privacy for Signal Processing and Machine Learning”. Of course, a workshop would not be successful without an exciting social program. Participants were delighted to have a guided tour of the Global Headquarters of CNN before going to the Sun Dial restaurant and its panoramic view for the gala dinner.

For information, the next Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS 2015), organised by Patrizio Campisi and Nasir Memon, will be in Rome, Italy. The submission deadline will be around June, as usual. Do not miss it!

It is worth noting that major SPS conferences will feature IFS content in their technical program this year. For instance, IEEE ICIP http://www.icip2015.org/ will have a special session on “Privacy and Security in the new Generation Video Coding”. Moreover, IEEE ICME http://www.icme2015.ieee-icme.org/ will have two security-flavored workshops, namely:

• the workshop on Multimedia Crime Scene Forensics for Fingerprint Acquisition and Processing (MM4CSF http://omen.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/mm4csf/);
• and the workshop on Web Multimedia Verification (WeMuV https://sites.google.com/site/wemuv2015/).

Honors and Awards

A year will not be complete without its batch of awards.

It is with great pleasure that we announce that the paper titled “Minimizing Additive Distortion I Steganography using Syndrome-trellis Codes” http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2011.2134094 authored by Tomáš Filler, Jan Judas and Jessica Fridrich and published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 6, No. 3, September 2011 has been granted a young author best paper award by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/awards-fellows/award-recipient/

K. J. Ray Liu is this year's recipient of the Society Award -- the highest honor given by the Signal Processing Society “for influential technical contributions and profound leadership impact.”  He is a former/founding member of our technical committee who initiated the vision for SPS to embrace the IFS areas through a three-leg development of TC, T-IFS journal and WIFS conference.

Finally, the 2014 Fellow promotion http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/awards-fellows/fellows-programs/ has been yet another occasion to acknowledge the technical achievements of IFS researchers:

• Christian Cachin, Ruschlikon, Switzerland: for contributions to steganography and secure distributed systems;
• Deepa Kundur, Toronto, Canada: for contributions to signal processing techniques for multimedia and cyber security;
• Aylin Yener, University Park, Pennsylvania: for contributions to wireless communication theory and wireless information security;
• Moti Yung, New York, New York: for contributions to cryptography.

Each year, the IEEE Board of Directors confers the grade of Fellow on up to one-tenth of one percent of the members. To qualify for consideration, an individual must have been a Member, normally for five years or more, and a Senior Member at the time for nomination to Fellow. The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in IEEE’s designated fields.