Keynote Speaker

Multimedia Information Security: An Overview of Research and Challenges
C. L. Philip Chen, Ph.D., FIEEE, FAAAS
Chair Professor and Dean
Faculty of Science and Technology
University of Macau, Macau SAR, China

Digital multimedia content, can be created, edited, distributed, shared, and stored with convenience at a very low cost over the mobile and ad hoc nature of today's various networks. As a result, multimedia security and digital authentication, transmission and detection of sensitive information via communication systems have become a very important research subject recently. Encryption and data hiding are two most popular areas in multimedia security research. This talk will focus on data hiding techniques, especially, steganography techniques.
Steganography is the hiding of a message within another message so that the presence of the hidden message is indiscernible. Practically, it is the art of secret communication. Digital data can be hidden in pictures, videos, music, text, binary files, or source code. The key concept behind steganography is that the message to be transmitted is not visible to the informal eye or ears. In fact, people who are not intended to be the recipients of the message should not even suspect that a hidden message exists. Recently, steganography has received enormous attention in industry and in academia because it has been reported that terrorists has been using information hiding to disguise their communications.
One the hand, the purpose of steganalysis is to discover the presence of hidden messages in digital media. Steganography and steganalysis have not been completely examined in detail by the scientific community outside the military. It is a relatively new and fast growing field. This area now has become a multimillion-dollar research market, and closely related to the security of every nation.

Note: The presented work is based on the result from Dr. S. Agaian, Dr. Chen and graduate students.

Philip Chen’s Biographical information:

C. L. Philip Chen received his M.S. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. in 1985, and his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A., in 1988, both degrees in Electrical Engineering. He was with Wright State University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, from 1989 to 2002 as an assistant, an associate, and a full professor before he joined the University of Texas, San Antonio, where he has been a Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies of the College of Engineering. Currently, he is Chair Professor and the Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau.

Dr. Chen has been a visiting research scientist at the Materials Directorate, U.S. Air Force Wright Lab since 1993 for 8 years. He has been a senior research fellow sponsored by the U.S. National Research Council and a research faculty fellow for NASA Glenn Research Center for several years. His current research interests include theoretical development in computational intelligence, intelligent systems, robotics and manufacturing automation, networking, diagnosis and prognosis, life prediction and life-extending control. Credited to his technical contribution, he is an elected IEEE Fellow and an AAAS Fellow (www.aaas.org).

Dr. Chen has been active in many IEEE international conference services and publications as a Program Chair and Organizing Committee. He was the General Chair of the 2009 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) annual conference, the General Co-Chair of 2008 IEEE SSIRI (Secure System Integration and Reliability Improvement), a Program Co-Chair of 2008 & 2010 ICMLC. He is the founding SMC Chapter Chair at Central Texas Section, Macau Chapter, and founding Co-Chairs of three SMCS Technical Committees (SoS, Enterprise Information Systems, and Information Assurance and Intelligent Multimedia). Currently, he is the Vice President on Conferences and Meetings of IEEE SMC Society, where he has been the VP on Technical Activities in Systems Science and Engineering, a member of IEEE SMC Board of Governors and the Treasurer. He serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for SMCS, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on SMC-C and IEEE Systems Journal. As a result of his assiduous service, he received Outstanding Contribution Award in 2008. In addition, he is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu honor societies. On education and academic service, Dr. Chen is the founding faculty advisor of IEEE Computer society student chapter and has been the faculty advisor of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In addition, he is a certified ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology Education) Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Software Engineering program evaluator in US.

Plenary Speakers

Picking the right cloud architecture: A brief discussion of platform-as-a-service versus infrastructure-as-a-service offerings
Chris Boesch
Practice Associate Professor of Information Systems
Singapore Management University
Abstract:

When architecting information systems for the cloud, different design patterns can be applied to better leverage the relative strengths of competing cloud platforms. In this talk, professor Boesch will discuss various architectural tradeoffs and considerations that can be made when comparing deployments to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon Web Services and Platform-as-a-Service offerings such as Google App Engine. Professor Boesch will briefly cover the merits of currently popular cloud platforms and share real-world experience obtained while developing and maintaining Singpath (singpath.com), a global programming game deployed to the public cloud.

With more than 15 years working in the high tech industry at Texas Instruments, Acer and Dell and now working as a Practice Associate Professor of Information Systems at Singapore Management University, Chris has considerable experience in the areas of architecture, design and building globally scalable applications.

From his software engineering background to his recent work integrating social media and cloud technologies, Chris continues to be on the leading edge of technology. He has filed 16 Patents since 1996 for both Hardware and Software innovations.

Chris can relate to large organizations interested in implementing projects of any size to start ups that want to embrace the cloud from the beginning. Chris’ engaging personality, and his vast expertise will prove intriguing to all participants.

Chris is a hands on pioneer who is passionate about the evolution of cloud computing. Chris received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University. Chris’ research interests include expert systems, cloud computing, and applying game dynamics in the field of education. He is a sought after speaker on the topic of Cloud Computing in Singapore.

Adaptive Computing for Embedded Systems
Tulika Mitra
School of Computing
National University of Singapore

Abstract:

Current generation consumer electronic devices such as smartphones need to support a diverse range of applications with significant variation in computational workloads. Moreover emerging applications for embedded systems such as multimedia processing, recognition and data mining are also highly dynamic in nature. It is difficult, if not possible, to accommodation such variable workloads with a single static hardware platform specially under stringest power, thermal, area, and cost constraints.

In this talk, we will present an adaptive computing system that can automomously tailor itself at runtime according to the workload. Our architecture enables dynamic configuration and customization along multiple dimensions. First, it allows hardware acceleration of selective compute-intensive tasks through on-chip reconfigurable fabric. Secondly, it permits runtime adaptation of micro-architectural parameters to track the available instruction-level parallelism of the application. An intelligent software framework selects the optimal configuration at runtime for time varying workloads. In parallel to adapting the underlying platform to match the computation, we will also present compiler techniques and a runtime layer that can shape the computation workload so as to best suit the runtime scenario while still satisfying user perception.

Tulika Mitra is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at National University of Singapore. Her research interest focuses on compilers and architectures for embedded systems. She has co-authored over 80 articles in international journals and conferences in this area. Her research has been
acknowledged with best paper award nominations in Design Automation Conference, International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis, International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, and Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems.

Dr. Mitra has served as program committee member of several leading conferences in embedded systems, electronic design automation, and reconfigurable computing including program/general co-chair for IEEE Symposium on Application Specific Processors. She is currently serving as the associate editor for IEEE Embedded Systems Letters and EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems.

Dr. Mitra received her B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University, India (1995), M.E. degree in Computer Science and Automation from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (1997), and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook (2000).