Arun Ross
Arun Ross is a Robert C. Byrd Associate Professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, and the Assistant Director of the NSF Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR). He received the B.E. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Michigan State University, East Lansing, in 1999 and 2003,respectively. Between 1996 and 1997, he was with the Design and Development Group of Tata Elxsi (India) Ltd., Bangalore, India. He also spent three summers (2000 - 2002) with the Imaging and Visualization Group of Siemens Corporate Research, Inc., Princeton, NJ, working on fingerprint recognition algorithms. His research interests include pattern recognition, classifier fusion, machine learning, computer vision, and biometrics. He is actively involved in the development of biometrics and pattern recognition curricula at West Virginia University. He received the West Virginia University Foundation Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2011. He is the coauthor of Handbook of Multibiometrics and co-editor of Handbook of Biometrics. Arun is a recipient of NSF's CAREER Award and was designated a Kavli Frontier Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
Biometrics: Past, Present and Future
Biometrics is the science of establishing human identity based on the physical and behavioral attributes of an individual such as fingerprints, face, iris, voice and signature. In its simplest form, biometric recognition involves comparing two signals, such as fingerprint images, to determine the probability that they originated from the same source (i.e., individual). The pronounced need for large-scale automated human recognition systems has resulted in the incorporation of biometric solutions in border security systems (e.g., US-VISIT program), access control applications (e.g., laptops), criminal investigations (e.g., AFIS), time-and-attendance technology (e.g., hand geometry readers) and national ID cards (e.g., Hong Kong SmartID). The ascent of biometrics over the past decade belies its humble beginnings in the late 19th century, when the technology was confined to the use of manually recorded human anthropometric measurements for identifying recidivists. Advances in the field of sensor manufacturing, signal processing, pattern recognition, computer vision and machine learning have led to the design of elegant biometric systems that can rapidly establish identity albeit with a few errors.
In the current biometric literature, issues related to biometric data security, privacy, system scalability, database indexing, sensor interoperability and recognition in non-ideal unconstrained environments have been emphasized. This talk will examine the recent progress made in biometrics and discuss some of the interesting problems being addressed by researchers in this field.
Helmut Bölcskei
Helmut Bölcskei was born in Mödling, Austria on May 29, 1970, and received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr. techn. degrees in electrical engineering from Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. In 1998 he was with Vienna University of Technology. From 1999 to 2001 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, and in the Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He was in the founding team of Iospan Wireless Inc., a Silicon Valley-based startup company (acquired by Intel Corporation in 2002) specialized in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems for high-speed Internet access, and was a co-founder of Celestrius AG, Zurich, Switzerland. From 2001 to 2002 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been with ETH Zurich since 2002, where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was a visiting researcher at Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands, ENST Paris, France, and the Heinrich Hertz Institute Berlin, Germany. His research interests are in information theory, mathematical signal processing, and applied and computational harmonic analysis.
He received the 2001 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2006 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Best Paper Award, the 2010 Vodafone Innovations Award, the ETH "Golden Owl" Teaching Award, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and was an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow (1999-2001) of the Austrian National Science Foundation (FWF). He was a plenary speaker at several IEEE conferences and served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. He is currently editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and serves on the editorial board of "Foundations and Trends in Networking". He was TPC co-chair of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Uncertainty Relations and Signal Recovery
The aim of this talk is to show how uncertainty relations allow to build a unified framework for understanding the fundamental limits of a wide range of signal reconstruction problems such as image inpainting, super-resolution, signal separation, denoising, and recovery of signals that are impaired by, e.g., clipping, impulse noise, or narrowband interference.
Sergio Verdú
A native of Barcelona, Sergio Verdú received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Barcelona in 1980, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. Since 1984 he has been a member of the faculty of Princeton University, where he is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering.
Sergio Verdú is the recipient of the 2007 Claude E. Shannon Award and the 2008 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2005.
He is a recipient of several paper awards from the IEEE: the 1992 Donald Fink Paper Award, the 1998 Information Theory Outstanding Paper Award, an Information Theory Golden Jubilee Paper Award, the 2002 Leonard Abraham Prize Award, the 2006 Joint Communications/Information Theory Paper Award, and the 2009 Stephen O. Rice Prize from IEEE Communications Society. He has also received paper awards from the Japanese Telecommunications Advancement Foundation and from Eurasip. In 1998, Cambridge University Press published his book "Multiuser Detection," for which he received the 2000 Frederick E. Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education.
Sergio Verdú served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1997. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.
What is Information Theory?
This talk will address the history of Claude Shannon's theory on the fundamental limits of data compression and data transmission through noisy channels. We will review the impact of information theory on the design of various information technologies, as well as its impact on other fields. We will also discuss the evolving perception of information theory since its inception in 1948 among the wider scientific community.
Nuria Oliver
Nuria Oliver is currently Scientific Director of the Multimedia, HCI, Data Mining & User Modeling Research Areas in Telefonica Research (Barcelona, Spain). She received the BSc (honors) and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the ETSIT at the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid (UPM), Spain, in 1992 and 1994 respectively. She received her PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, in June 2000. From July 2000 until November 2007, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. At the end of 2007, she returned to Spain to take on her current position as Scientific Director and help create the Scientific Teams at Telefonica Research. It is an exciting opportunity to do research in her own country.
Her research interests include mobile computing, multimedia data analysis, search and retrieval, smart environments, context awareness, statistical machine learning and data mining, artificial intelligence, health monitoring, social network analysis, computational social sciencies, and human computer interaction. She is currently working on the previous disciplines to build human-centric intelligent systems.
Nuria has written over 70 papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. Her work has been widely recognized by the scientific community with over 3100 citations. Nuria has over 30 patent applications and granted patents. She is also in the program committee and a reviewer of the top conferences in her research areas (IJCAI, IUI, UMAP, ACM Multimedia, ICMI-MLMI, Interaccion, PervasiveHealth, MIR, LoCA, MMM, CVPR, Ubicomp, MobileHCI, ICCV, AAAI, etc...). She was program co-chair of IUI 2009 and of MIR 2010. She is general conference co-chair of UMAP 2011, industry-day co-chair of IJCAI 2011 and sponsorship co-chair of ICMI 2011.
She believes in the power of technology to empower and increase the quality of life of people. She has received a number of awards, including the ‘Rising Star’ by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society (2009), MIT’s ‘TR100 Young Innovators Award’ (2004) and the First Spanish Award of EECS graduates (1994). Besides her scientific publications, she is very interested in making science available to the general public. She has been a technology writer for Tecno2000 magazine and ‘El Pais’ newspapers, among others. Her work has been featured on multiple newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations both in Spain and the US. She has been named one of the '100 leaders of the future ' by Capital Magazine (May 2009) and one of the 'Generation XXI: 40 Spanish youngsters that will make news in the Third Millenium ' by EL PAIS (2000). She is proficient in multiple foreign languages and she studied classical ballet for 13 years. Her hobbies include traveling, cinema, art, classical music, yoga, Formula Dodge racing, dance and swimming.
Urban Computing and Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges
City-wide urban infrastructures are increasingly reliant on networked technology to improve and expand their services. As a side effect of this digitalization, large amounts of data –digital footprints-- can be sensed and analyzed to uncover patterns of human urban behavior and to augment the city experience of its citizens. In my talk, I will introduce the main concepts, opportunities and challenges in this emerging area of urban computing and will present some recent work on analyzing the digital footprints from the urban infrastructure. I will show how these digital footprints can be used to infer cultural and geographic aspects of the city and predict aspects of the city’s behavior. Finally, I will also illustrate a few examples of mobile applications that enhance the experience of the city by seamlessly combining digital and physical information.
Riccardo De Gaudenzi
Riccardo De Gaudenzi was born in Italy in 1960. He received his Doctor Engineer degree (cum Laude) in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy in 1985 and the PhD from the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands in 1999. From 1986 to 1988 he was with the European Space Agency (ESA), Stations and Communications Engineering Department, Darmstadt (Germany) where he was involved in satellite telecommunication ground systems design and testing. In particular, he followed the development of two new ESA's satellite tracking systems. In 1988, he joined ESA’s Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, The Netherlands where in 2000 he has been appointed head of the Communication Systems Section and since 2005 he is Head of the RF Payload and Systems Division. The division is responsible for supporting the definition and development of advanced satellite system, subsystems and related technologies for telecommunications, navigation and earth observation applications. In 1996 he spent one year with Qualcomm Inc., San Diego USA, in the Globalstar LEO project system group under an ESA fellowship. His current interest is mainly related with efficient digital modulation and multiple access techniques for fixed and mobile satellite services, synchronization topics, adaptive interference mitigation techniques and communication systems simulation techniques. He actively contributed to the development and the demonstration of the ETSI S-UMTS Family A, DVB-S2 and DVB-SH standards. From 2001 to 2005 he has been serving as Associate Editor for CDMA and Synchronization for IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is co-recipient of the 2003 and 2008 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award Best Paper from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.
The Evolution of Satellite Communications - A Signal Processing Perspective
Following 1945 A. C. Clarke intuition of the satellite Geostationary concept, satellite communication technology has been becoming a reality in the late 60’s making possible intercontinental voice and video communications. In the 70’s also mobile satellite telecommunications for maritime users became a reality. The development of satellite telecommunication technology has been driving the introduction of advanced coding schemes such as the Viterbi’s algorithm and multiple access schemes such as Time Division Multiple Access and associated burst mode demodulator. These two technologies were the base for the terrestrial GSM digital mobile standard which had an unprecedented commercial success.
Nowadays the technology pioneering role of satellite communications appears to be shadowed by the fast pace development of wireless terrestrial technologies. In this talk a review of most promising signal processing techniques adopted or candidate for being adopted in modern satellite networks. Differences in the satellite operating system conditions compared to terrestrial networks will be stressed as well as the required adaptationsof signal processing techniques.
Aljoscha Smolic
Dr. Aljoscha Smolic joined Disney Research Zurich, Switzerland in 2009, as Senior Research Scientist and Head of the “Advanced Video Technology” group. Before he was Scientific Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), Berlin, also heading a research group. He has been involved in several national and international research projects, where he conducted research in various fields of video processing, video coding, computer vision and computer graphics and published more than 100 referred papers in these fields. In current projects he is responsible for research in 2D video, 3D video and free viewpoint video processing and coding. He received the Dipl.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in 1996, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany, in 2001. Dr. Smolic received the “Rudolf-Urtlel-Award” of the German Society for Technology in TV and Cinema (FKTG) for his dissertation in 2002. He is Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication and served as Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on CSVT, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and other scientific journals. He is Committee Member of several conferences, including ICIP, ICME, and EUSIPCO and served in several Chair positions of conferences. He chaired the MPEG ad hoc group on 3DAV pioneering standards for 3D video. In this context he also served as one of the Editors of the Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) standard. Since many years he is teaching full lecture courses on Multimedia Communications and other topics, now at ETH Zurich.
Content Creation for Stereoscopic 3D and Beyond
2010 was the year of breakthrough for 3D video. Stereoscopic 3D is established in cinema, on Blu-ray, TV, PCs, laptops, and mobile devices. Since technology for stereo 3D is mature and content creation is understood well enough, these developments are expected to be sustainable this time. Most current systems rely on classical approaches to 3D video, i.e. representation as stereo or multiview video, coding and transmission using simulcast, frame-compatible composition or MVC. More advanced “next generation” approaches exploit some kind of understanding of the 3D scene geometry such as depth or disparity, in order to extend functionality and increase efficiency. This includes for instance flexible adjustment of depth impression to viewing conditions and user preferences or support of autostereoscopic multiview displays. Also content creation for classical stereo 3D can greatly benefit from such 3D geometry aware processing. Naturally such advanced 3D video representation formats require advanced processing algorithms, e.g., to extract 3D geometry and to render virtual views. Such advanced 3D video representation and processing will be the focus of this talk.
Sergios Theodoridis
Sergios Theodoridis is currently Professor of Signal Processing and Communications in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. His research interests lie in the areas of Adaptive Algorithms and Communications, Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, Signal Processing for Audio Processing and Retrieval. He is the co-editor of the book “Efficient Algorithms for Signal Processing and System Identification”, Prentice Hall 1993, the co-author of the best selling book “Pattern Recognition”, Academic Press, 4th ed. 2008, the co-author of the book “Introduction to Pattern Recognition: A MATLAB Approach”, Academic Press, 2009, and the co-author of three books in Greek, two of them for the Greek Open University.He is the co-author of six papers that have received best paper awards including the 2009 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding paper Award. He has served as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer.
He was the general chairman of EUSIPCO-98, the Technical Program co-chair for ISCAS-2006 and co-chairman and co-founder of CIP-2008 and co-chairman of CIP-2010. He has served as President of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) and as member of the Board of Governors for the IEEE CAS Society. He currently serves as member of the Board of Governors (Member-at-Large) of the IEEE SP Society.
He has served as a member of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology and he was Chairman of the SP advisory committee for the Edinburgh Research Partnership (ERP). He has served as vice chairman of the Greek Pedagogical Institute and he was for four years member of the Board of Directors of COSMOTE (the Greek mobile phone operating company). He is Fellow of IET, a Corresponding Fellow of RSE and a Fellow of IEEE.
Adaptive Learning in a World of Projections
The task of parameter/function estimation has been at the center of scientific attention for a long time and it comes under different names such as filtering, prediction, beamforming, curve fitting, classification, regression.
In this talk, the estimation task is treated in the context of set theoretic estimation arguments. Instead of a single optimal point, we are searching for a set of solutions that are in agreement with the available information, which is provided to us in the form of a set of training points and a set of constraints. Each point in the training data set, as well as each one of the constraints, is associated with a convex set, constructed according to a (convex) loss function (differentiable or not).
The goal of this talk is to present a general tool for parameter/function estimation, under a set of convex constraints, both for classification as well as regression tasks, in a time adaptive setting in (infinite dimensional) Reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS).
The algorithmic scheme consists of a sequence of projections, of linear complexity with respect to the number of unknown parameters. Our theory proves that such a scheme converges to the intersection of all (with the possible exception of a finite number of) the convex sets, where the required solution lies. The performance of the methodology is demonstrated in the context of nonlinear classification and robust beamforming in communication systems.
The work has been carried out in cooperation with Kostas Slavakis and Isao Yamada.
Walter Kellermann
Walter Kellermann is a professor for communications at the Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (univ.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1983, and the Dr.-Ing. degree ('with distinction') from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, in 1988. From 1989 to 1990, he was a Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. In 1990, he joined Philips Kommunikations Industrie, Nuremberg, Germany. From 1993 to 1999 he was a professor at the Fachhochschule Regensburg before he joined the University Erlangen-Nuremberg as a professor and head of the audio research laboratory in 1999. In 1999 he co-founded the consulting firm DSP Solutions.
Dr. Kellermann authored or co-authored 16 book chapters and more than 170 refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings. He served as an associate editor and as guest editor to various journals, e.g., to the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from 2000 to 2004, and to the EURASIP Journal on Signal Processing. Presently he serves as associate editor to the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing and as a Member of the Overview Editorial Board for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was the general chair of the 5th International Workshop on Microphone Arrays in 2003 and the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics in 2005. He was the general co-chair of the 2nd International Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA) in 2008 and is a general co-chair for HSCMA 2011. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for 2007 and 2008. He was the Chair of the Technical Committee for Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2008 to 2010. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Acoustic Signal Processing for Natural Interactive and Immersive Human/Machine Interfaces
Since the very beginning of audio signal reproduction, immersion was always seen as a crucial feature of high quality. With the arrival of teleconferencing systems, immersive multichannel reproduction became part of telecommunication systems, and the according terminals developed into multi-functional human/machine interfaces, supporting not just telecommunication but also gaming, simulators, control consoles interactive home theatres and many other purposes. Along with increasingly powerful and cost-effective signal processing hardware, the according acoustic signal processing algorithms developed dramatically over the last decade striving for perfect solutions for the fundamental problems of acoustic interfaces: Acoustic feedback from loudspeakers to microphones, noise and interfering sources, and reverberation in enclosures.
In this talk, we will shortly review the fundamental problems and then highlight some recent developments in acoustic echo control for massive multichannel reproduction, signal extraction, source localization, dereverberation, as well as distant-talking speech recognition. Finally, we also will speculate on promising avenues for future research.
Mateo Valero
Mateo Valero is a professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC, in Barcelona. His research interests focuses on high performance architectures. He has published approximately 500 papers, has served in the organization of more than 300 International Conferences and he has given more than 300 invited talks. He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the National Centre of Supercomputing in Spain.
Dr. Valero has been honoured with several awards. Among them, the Eckert-Mauchly Award, by the IEEE and the ACM, the IEEE Harry Goode, two Spanish National awards, the "Julio Rey Pastor" to recognize research on IT technologies and the “Leonardo Torres Quevedo” to recognize research in Engineering, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, presented by the King of Spain and the “King Jaime I” in research by the Generalitat Valenciana presented by the Queen of Spain. He has been named Honorary Doctor by the University of Chalmers, by the University of Belgrade, by the Universities of Las Palmas de Gran Canarias and Zaragoza in Spain and by the University of Veracruz in Mexico. "Hall of the Fame", selected as one of the 25 most influents European researchers in IT during the period 1983-2008.
In December 1994, Professor Valero became a founding member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering. In 2005 he was elected Correspondant Academic of the Spanish Royal Academy of Science and in 2006, member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Doctors and member of the “Academia Europaea”, the “Academy of Europe”. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the ACM and an Intel Distinguished Research Fellow. In 1998 he won a “Favourite Son” Award of his home town, Alfamén (Zaragoza) and in 2006, his native town of Alfamén named their Public College after him.
Towards Exaflop Supercomputers
Having recently surpassed the Petascale barrier, supercomputers designers and users are now facing the next challenge. A thousand fold performance increase that if the improvement rate of the last decades continues will be reached around 2018.
Being power the main constraint and facing many hardware challenges, software is probably the biggest one. Worldwide and cooperative initiatives are being started to perform research facing such objective.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is involved in such initiatives and carries out the MareIncognito research project aiming at developing some of the technologies that we consider will be of key relevance on the way to Exascale.
The talk will briefly discuss relevant issues, foreseen architectures and software approaches that will have to be developed in order to successfully install and operate such machines.