Exploring Power Network Signatures for Information Forensics

September 17, 2015 at 12:00 p.m. Dr. Min Wu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park will be presenting “Exploring Power Network Signatures for Information Forensics”.

Speaker: Dr. Min Wu
IEEE Fellow
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Maryland, College Park

Day & Time: Thursday, September 17, 2015
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Location: Room ENG105, Ryerson University
245 Church Street, Toronto, Ontario M5B 2K3
Click here to see the Map – Look for ENG

Organizer: IEEE Signal Processing Society
Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Program
CASPAL Ryerson

Contact: Prof. Xiao-Ping Zhang
CASPAL (Communications and Signal Processing Applications Lab.)
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Ryerson University

Abstract: Osama bin Laden’s video propaganda prompted numerous information forensic questions: given a video under question, when and where was it shot? Was the sound track captured together at the same time/location as the visual, or superimposed later? Similar questions about the time, location, and integrity of multimedia and other sensor recordings are important to provide evidence and trust in crime solving, journalism, infrastructure monitoring, smart grid management, and other informational operations.

An emerging line of research toward addressing these questions exploits novel signatures induced by the power network. An example is the small random-like fluctuations of the electricity frequency known as the Electric Network Frequency (ENF), owing to the dynamic control process to match the electricity supplies with the demands in the grid. These environmental signatures reflect the attributes and conditions of the power grid and become naturally “embedded” into various types of sensing signals. They carry time and location information and may facilitate integrity verification of the primary sensing data. This talk will provide an overview of recent information forensics research on ENF carried out by our Media and Security Team (MAST) at University of Maryland, and discuss some on-going and open research issues in and beyond security applications.

Biography:Min Wu is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2001. At UMD, she leads the Media and Security Team (MAST), with main research interests on information security and forensics and multimedia signal processing. Her research and education have been recognized by a NSF CAREER award, a TR100 Young Innovator Award from the MIT Technology Review Magazine, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Computer World “40 Under 40” IT Innovator Award, a University of Maryland Invention of the Year Award, an IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Early Career Teaching Award, and several paper awards from IEEE SPS, ACM, and EURASIP. She was elected IEEE Fellow for contributions to multimedia security and forensics. Dr. Wu chaired the IEEE Technical Committee on Information Forensics and Security (2012-2013), and has served as Vice President – Finance of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2010-2012) and Founding Chief Editor of the IEEE SigPort initiative (2013-2014). Currently, she is serving as Editor-in-Chief (2015-2017) of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.