Invited Speakers

Yao Zhao received the Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), Beijing, China, in 1996. He became an Associate Professor at BJTU in 1998 and became a Professor in 2001. From 2001 to 2002, he was a Senior Research Fellow with the Information and Communication Theory Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. In October 2015, he visited the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL). From December 2017 to March 2018, he visited the University of Southern California. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Information Science, BJTU. His current research interests include image/video coding, digital watermarking and forensics, video analysis and understanding and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Zhao serves on the Editorial Boards of several international journals, including as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS, an Senior Associate Editor of the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, and an Area Editor of Signal Processing: Image Communication. He was named a Distinguished Young Scholar by the National Science Foundation of China in 2010, and was elected as a Chang Jiang Scholar of Ministry of Education of China in 2013. He is a Fellow of the IET.

Xiangui Kang Received the B.S. degree from Peking University, Beijing, China, and the Ph.D. degree from Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China. He was a visiting scholar with University of British-Columbia in 2014, with University of Maryland-College Park during 2011 – 2012, and with New Jersey Institute of Technology during 2004 – 2005. He is currently a professor with the school of data and computer science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China, and also assume the vice director of Guangdong key laboratory information security technology. His research interests include information forensics, watermarking, and multimedia communications and security. He has published more than 70 research papers in major international academic journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

Dr. Kang is the vice chair of Multimedia Security and Forensics Technical Committee of Asian-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association and was a member of IEEE ComSoc’s Multimedia Communications Technical Committee. He is an area editor for Signal processing: Image Communication.

Pedro Comesaña-Alfaro received the Telecommunications Engineering degree (with specializations in both Computer Science and Communications) from the University of Vigo, Spain, in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree on Telecommunications Engineering from the same university in 2006; he also holds a five-year degree on Mathematics. His Ph.D. thesis was awarded by the Spanish Official Institute of Telecommunications Engineers as the best Ph.D. thesis in Security and Defense in 2006.

He conducted research stays at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (The Netherlands, 2004, 6 months), University College Dublin (Ireland, 2006, 6 months), Università degli Studi di Siena (Italy, 2007 and 2008, 10 months), University of New Mexico (USA, 2010 and 2011, 12 months, being sponsored by the Prince of Asturias Endowed Chair), and State University of New York at Binghamton (USA, 2015, 4 months).

Since 2012 he is Associate Professor in the School of Telecommunications Engineering, University of Vigo. His research interests lie in the areas of digital watermarking, information security, multimedia forensics and digital communications.

He is co-author of more than 60 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings, holds a triadic patent on the field of video-surveillance authentication, and several European and American patents on multimedia security. He received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (IEEE-WIFS) in 2014, and the Best Paper Award of the International Workshop on Digital-forensics and Watermarking (IWDW) in 2011.

He participated in the FP6 ECRYPT European NoE, and in the FP7 European Projects REWIND and NIFTy; he was also the principal investigator of several regional projects in the area of multimedia security, and has signed 14 innovation projects.

From November 2012 to December 2015, Pedro was member of the IEEE SPS Information Forensics and Security-Technical Committee (IEEE IFS-TC), chair of its WIFS subcommittee, and member of the Technical Directions, and Award Subcommittees; he also served as a member of the IEEE SPS Student Services Committee from 2015 to 2018. He currently serves his second term in IEEE IFS-TC.

Furthermore, Pedro served as Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IET Information Security, and Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. At this moment he is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. Pedro was Technical Co-Chair of EUSIPCO 2018 and ACM IH&MMSec 2015, Area Chair of IEEE ICIP 2015, Publications Chair of ACM IH&MMSec 2016, and Tutorials Chair of IEEE Workshop of Information Forensics and Security 2012 (WIFS12). Pedro has reviewed over 450 journal papers, and is also a frequent reviewer of the most important conferences on signal and image processing, and multimedia security.