ICNC

Shu-Ching Chen (IEEE/AAAS/SIRI Fellow)
Eminent Scholar Chaired Professor, Florida International University, USA

Title: Multimedia Big Data Analytics: Research and Applications
Time: 16:00-18:00, Sunday, January 29, 2017

Abstract:
The pervasiveness of mobile devices & consumer electronics and the popularity of Internet & social networks have generated huge amounts of multimedia information in various media types (such as text, image, video, and audio) shared among a large number of people. This creates the opportunities and intensifies the interest of the research community in developing methods to address multimedia big data analytics challenges for real-world applications. In this talk, I will discuss the research opportunities and challenges in multimedia big data analytics, and introduce a coherent framework for multimedia big data management, retrieval, and analysis. A set of core techniques, such as multimedia big data analysis, content-based image/video retrieval, and multimedia data mining, will be discussed in details and demonstrated using a prototype system. In addition, I will present the idea of applying these techniques to practical applications such as disaster information management.

Biography:

Dr. Shu-Ching Chen is an Eminent Scholar Chaired Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computing and Information Sciences (SCIS), Florida International University (FIU), Miami. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA in 1998. He is the Director of Distributed Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory and Co-Director of the Integrated Computer Augmented Virtual Environment (I-CAVE) at SCIS. His main research interests include multimedia big data, content-based image/video retrieval, distributed multimedia database management systems, multimedia data mining, and disaster information management. Dr. Chen has authored and coauthored more than 300 research papers and four books. Dr. Chen has been the PI/Co-PI of many research grants from NSF, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Homeland Security, Army Research Office, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, IBM, and Florida Department of Transportation with a total amount of more than 26 million dollars.

Dr. Chen was named a 2011 recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award. He received the best paper awards from 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia and 2016 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration. He was awarded the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society’s Outstanding Contribution Award in 2005 and was the co-recipient of the IEEE Most Active SMC Technical Committee Award in 2006. He was also awarded the Inaugural Excellence in Graduate Mentorship Award from FIU in 2006, the University Outstanding Faculty Research Award from FIU in 2004, the Excellence in Mentorship Award from SCIS in 2010, the Outstanding Faculty Service Award from SCIS in 2004 and 2014, and the Outstanding Faculty Research Award from SCIS in 2002 and 2012. He has been a General Chair and Program Chair for more than 55 conferences, symposiums, and workshops. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management, and Associate Editor/Editorial Board of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia, IEEE Trans. on Human-Machine Systems, etc. He served as the Chair of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing. He is Co-Chair of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society’s Technical Committee on Knowledge Acquisition in Intelligent Systems. He was a steering committee member of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He is a fellow of IEEE, AAAS and SIRI.

Zhi Ding (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, University of California, Davis, USA

Title: Galois Comes to the Rescue: Unifying Detection and Decoding in Designing Robust Wireless Communication Receivers
Time: 10:00-12:00, Sunday, January 29, 2017

Abstract:

Traditional wireless communication receivers in the physical layer are responsible for both data symbol detection, in the complex field, and error correction decoding, in the Galois field. Integrated maximum likelihood data recovery across the two fields has proven elusive due to high complexity. Message passing in the spirit of (turbo) belief propagation has been broadly utilized since the 1990’s. In this talk, we present a novel receiver methodology to integrate signal detection and forward error correction in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communications and various diversity transmissions. Moving beyond traditional approaches relying on belief-propagation, we investigate the rather classic but open problem of integrated signal detection and decoding involves novel joint optimization formulations that incorporate binary field parity constraints imposed by the low-density parity check within maximum likelihood detection frameworks for unified optimization.

This novel framework is general and encompasses a number of practical transmission models, including distributed antennas, opportunistic cooperative networking, and signal retransmission as well as their integrations. For multicarrier MIMO signal reception, we present develop and optimize integrated receivers for important wireless network diversities including distributed transmissions, cooperative MIMO, and hybrid-ARQ retransmission systems. By reformulating and relaxing joint detection and decoding problems into convex optimization, we develop high performance receivers that are efficient and are robust to various forms of uncertainties including channel state information. The work contributes practically to improving future wireless services and broaden their applications in many practical fields where concerns involving quality, efficiency, and distributivity are paramount.

Biography:

Zhi Ding (S'88-M'90-SM'95-F'03, IEEE) is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1990. From 1990 to 2000, he was a faculty member of Auburn University and later, University of Iowa. Prof. Ding has held visiting positions in Australian National University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, NASA Lewis Research Center and USAF Wright Laboratory. From 2013-2015, he was the founding Executive Dean for the School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University. Prof. Ding has active collaboration with colleagues from Australia, China, Finland, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Dr. Ding was awarded the 2012 IEEE Communications Society Wireless Technical Committee Recognition Award to honor his original contributions in wireless communications,

Dr. Ding is a Fellow of IEEE and has been an active member of IEEE, serving on technical programs of several workshops and conferences. He was associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing from 1994-1997, 2001-2004, and associate editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters 2002-2005. He was a member of technical committee on Statistical Signal and Array Processing and member of technical committee on Signal Processing for Communications (1994-2003). Dr. Ding was the Technical Program Chair of the 2006 IEEE Globecom. He is also an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (Circuits and Systems Society, 2004-06, Communications Society, 2008-10). He served as a member of the Steering Committee for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2007-2009) and its Chair (2009-2011). Dr. Ding is a coauthor of the widely adopted textbook: Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems, 4th edition (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Dr. Ding has held visiting positions in Australian National University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, NASA Lewis Research Center, and USAF Wright Laboratory. Prof. Ding has active collaboration with researchers from several regions including Australia, China, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He is also a visiting professor of the Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Prasant Mohapatra (IEEE/AAAS Fellow)
Professor, University of California, Davis, USA

Title: Smart-Sensing using Smartphones
Time: 10:00-12:00, Saturday, January 28, 2017

Abstract:
With the expansive usage of mobile devices and potential growth in the deployment of Internet of things, we will have proliferation of smart sensors in our handheld devices, wearables, and in our surroundings. Making sense out of the web of sensors is what we term as Smart-Sensing. Smart-Sensing would involve accurate and innovative sensing approaches while using minimal resources. In this talk, we will have an overview of a few approaches and novel ideas for smart-sensing using smartphones. Capturing the movement of fingers and hand gestures through accelerometer and gyroscope, we will develop the concept of finger-writing using smartwatches. Sensor assisted biometric authentication will be the next topic of our discussion. Then we will explore how the WiFi APs can detect the movement of other devices as well as identify humans. The last part of the talk will demonstrate the use of accelerometer for detecting voice and we will propose the use of this concept for saving energy consumption in smart devices. The talk will conclude with the summary of the potential research scope and applications of Smart-Sensing environments.

Biography:

Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and serves as the Dean and Vice-Provost of Graduate at the University of California, Davis. He is a former Endowed Chair of the Department of Computer Science. In the past, he has held Visiting Professor positions at AT&T, Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA), University of Padova, Italy, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Yonsei University, South Korea. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM WINET, and Ad Hoc Networks. He has been on the program/organizational committees of several international conferences.

Alexandros Potamianos (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece

Title: Cognitive Multimodal Processing: From Signal to Behavior
Time: 13:30-15:30, Sunday, January 29, 2017

Abstract:
Affective computing, social and behavioral signal processing are emerging research disciplines that attempt to automatically label the emotional, social and cognitive state of humans using features extracted from audio-visual streams. I argue that this monumental task cannot succeed unless the particularities of the human cognitive processing are incorporated into our models, especially given that often the quantities we are called to model are either biased cognitive abstractions of the real world or altogether fictional creations of our cognition. A variety of cognitive processes that make computational modeling especially challenging are outlined, notably: 1) (joint) attention and saliency, 2) common ground, conceptual semantic spaces and representation learning, 3) fusion across time, modalities and cognitive representation layers, and 4) dual-system processing (system one vs. system two) and cognitive decision non-linearities. In this presentation, grand challenges are outlined and examples are given illustrating how to design models that are both high-performing and respect basic cognitive organization principles. It is shown that such models can achieve good generalization and representation power, as well as model cognitive biases, a prerequisite for modeling and predicting human behavior.

Biography:

Alexandros Potamianos received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1990. He received the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA in 1991 and 1995, respectively. He received the M.B.A. degree from Stern School of Business, NYU in 2002. From 1991 to June 1993 he was a research assistant at the Robotics Lab, Harvard University. From 1993 to 1995 he was a research assistant at the Digital Signal Processing Lab at Georgia Tech. From 1995 to 1999 he was a Senior Technical Staff Member at the Speech and Image Processing Lab, AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park, NJ. From 1999 to 2002 he was a Technical Staff Member and Technical Supervisor at the Multimedia Communications Lab at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ. From 1999 to 2001 he was an adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Columbia University, New York, NY. From 2003 to 2013 he was an adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering of Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece. In the summer of 2013, he joined the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece as an associate professor. His current research interests include speech processing, analysis, synthesis and recognition, dialog and multi-modal systems, lexical semantics, nonlinear signal processing, natural language understanding, artificial intelligence and multimodal child-computer interaction. Prof. Potamianos has authored or co-authored over 120 papers in professional journals and conferences. He is the co-author of the paper "Creating conversational interfaces for children" that received a 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award. He is the co-editor of the book "Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video, Text", Springer, 2008. He holds four patents. He has been a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 1992, a senior member since 2010, and a fellow since 2016. He has served three term at the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee and one term at the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Committee. He is the co-founder of Behavioral Signal Technologies, Inc. and Behavioral Informatix, Inc.