|  Joseph Paradiso, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Linking Virtual and Real Worlds Through Ubiquitous Sensor Networks We are witnessing the dawn of a ubiquitous networked sensor infrastructure, leveraged by the increasingly low cost of microelectronics, sensors, and wireless technologies. As these now independent application-silo systems begin to converge through common standards, the world becomes covered by a seamless electronic "nervous system," that extends across things, places, and people. One of the biggest challenges facing researchers is how to appropriately interface humans with this wealth of real-time information. Applications of such an augmented awareness are readily evident in areas like supply chain and logistics management, urban optimization (e.g., transportation and energy), factory & plant operation, etc. Taking a broad perspective, however, this transition is profound - one's interface into this environment can be envisioned as an extension of human perception, augmenting our five senses well beyond the canonical "here and now" and redefining the meaning of presence. This talk will overview recent work by the author and his students at the MIT Media Lab that addresses the broad theme of interfacing humans to this electronic sensorium. Application examples will involve cross- reality (everywhere blending of real and virtual worlds), personalization and security for ubiquitous media interaction, wearable sensing, smart objects, human-computer interfaces and instrumented social interaction. Joseph Paradiso is the Sony Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he directs the Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception. In addition, he co-directs the Things That Think Consortium, a group of industry sponsors and Media Lab researchers who explore the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing. After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive and RFID sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. His honors include the 2000 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation, and he has authored 200 articles and technical reports on topics ranging from computer music to power scavenging. After receiving a BS in electrical engineering and physics summa cum laude from Tufts University, Paradiso became a K.T. Compton fellow at the Lab for Nuclear Science at MIT, receiving his PhD in physics there for research conducted at CERN in Geneva. | |  Biing‐Hwang (Fred) Juang, Georgia Institute of Technology
Interactive Acoustics: A Frontier in Signal Processing for Immersive Communication The vision of immersive communication is to bring people together to engage in collaborative activities and to enable life‐like experiences and interactions among people, objects, ambience, and environments that may not be all geographically co‐located. This vision can be considered a direct extension of the concept of telecommunication, but in recent years has become a central grand challenge in the research community as it spawns many new and interesting signal processing problems. Immersive communication involves full‐dimensional (i.e., sight, sound and touch) sensory (or media) interactions. In this talk, we primarily focus on one particular interactive media dimension, namely sound, and highlight several interesting advances and challenges from the acoustic signal processing perspective, ranging from the design of new microphone arrays and the problem of source localization and tracking, to multi‐channel acoustic echo control and semi‐blind source separation.
Professor Biing‐Hwang (Fred) Juang received his Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara. He had worked at Speech Communications Research Laboratory (SCRL) and Signal Technology, Inc. (STI) on a number of Government‐sponsored research projects. Notable accomplishments during the period include development of vector quantization for voice applications, voice coders at extremely low bit rates, 800 bps and around 300 bps, and robust vocoders for use in satellite communications. He subsequently joined Bell Laboratories in 1982, working in the area of speech enhancement, coding and recognition. Prof. Juang later became Director of Acoustics and Speech Research at Bell Labs, and at the turn of the century, Director of Multimedia Technologies Research at Avaya Labs (a spin‐off of Bell Labs). His group continued the long heritage of Bell Labs in speech communication research. Prof. Juang has published extensively, including the book “Fundamentals of Speech Recognition”, co‐authored with L.R. Rabiner. He had served as Editor‐in‐Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, and a number of positions in the IEEE Signal Processing Society, including Chair of its Fellow Evaluation Committee. Prof. Juang has received a number of technical awards, notable among which are several Best Paper awards in the area of speech communications and processing, the Technical Achievement Award from the Signal Processing Society of the IEEE, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of Bell Laboratories, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and an Academician of Academia Sinica. Prof. Juang joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002 holding the Motorola Foundation Chair Professorship and is an Eminent Scholar of Georgia Research Alliance.
| |  R. (Inald) L. Lagendijk, Delft University of Technology
Secure Signal Processing: Merging the Worlds of Signal Processing and Cryptography In the past decade the availability of accessing high computation power, storage capacity and high speed transmission lines has introduced many user-oriented business models. Applications from social networks to online shopping are now available to the users. Companies also benefit from such services since it is possible to keep record of user behavior and deduce useful information for a better planning in their business. However, most of the collected data involve personal descriptors that can be easily abused. This fact raises a number of privacy concerns among users. A big challenge is how to establish trust in such systems where users can protect their privacy while the business owner can still provide a reliable and personalized service. In this talk, we present an emerging idea that combines cryptography directly with signal processing during the design of the applications where privacy is a substantial requirement. The idea takes into account the nature and structure of the signals and the user specific data to develop efficient privacy-enhanced solutions. We present examples from the domains of secure clustering and secure face recognition. Reginald L. Lagendijk (S’87–M’90–SM’97-F'07) received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 1985 and 1990, respectively. He became an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology in 1987. Since 1999, he has been full Professor in the Information and Communication Theory Group, Delft University of Technology. He was a Visiting Scientist in the Electronic Image Processing Laboratories, Eastman Kodak Research, Rochester, NY, in 1991 and Visiting Professor at Microsoft Research and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2000 and 2003, respectively. In 2008, prof. Lagendijk became scientific director of the Delft Research Centre on ICT. He is author of Iterative Identification and Restoration of Images (Kluwer, 1991) and a coauthor of Motion Analysis and Image Sequence Processing (Kluwer, 1993) and Image and Video Databases: Restoration, Watermarking, and Retrieval (Elsevier, 2000). Prof. Lagendijk has been involved in the conference organizing committees of ICIP2001, 2003, 2006, and 2011. At present his research interests include multimedia signal processing theory and algorithms, with emphasis on audiovisual communications, compression, analysis, searching, and security. He is currently leading and actively involved in a number of projects in the field of intelligent information processing and multimedia communications. Prof. Lagendijk was a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Committee on Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING’s Supplement on Secure Digital Media, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY. | |