Keynote Speeches

Self-Defending Optical Networks: Optical Channel Protection and Countermeasures

Fiberoptic DWDM networks transport an aggregate data rate that exceeds Tbps. Because of the huge information rate, optical channels need to be monitored continuously in-service and in-real time. Some of the key channel performance metrics are the Bit Error Performance (BER), and the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Currently, these metrics are measured using EDCs and BERTS; EDCs are embedded in the information signal of the channel, and they require many frames of information, and BERTS are specialized equipment used off-service. In this talk, we describe a statistical method which estimates the performance parameters (BER, SNR, NF, Q, and min-max signal levels) of all incoming communication channels simultaneously, in real-time and in-service. In addition, we describe the realization of the method with a simple CMOS circuit and its applicability to multiple channel protection. Finally, we develop strategies for optical network self-defense upon the detection of network intruders.

Stamatios V. Kartalopoulos, PhD, is currently the Williams Professor in Telecommunications Networking at the University of Oklahoma. His research emphasis is on optical communication networks (FSO, fiber-optic long haul and FTTH), optical metamaterials, and optical communications security including quantum cryptography and chaotic functions. Prior to this, he was with Bell Laboratories where he defined, led and managed research and development teams in the areas of DWDM networks, SONET/SDH and ATM, Cross-connects, Switching, Transmission and Access systems. He has received the President’s Award and many awards of Excellence.
He holds nineteen patents in communications networks, and has published more than two hundred scientific papers, ten reference textbooks in advanced fiber optic communications and security, and has contributed several chapters to other books.
He has been an IEEE and a Lucent Technologies Distinguished Lecturer and has lectured at universities, NASA and conferences internationally. He has been keynote speaker of major international conferences, has moderated executive forums, has been a panelist of interdisciplinary panels, and has organized symposia, workshops and sessions at major international communications conferences.
Dr Kartalopoulos is an IEEE Life Fellow, founder and past-chair of the IEEE ComSoc Communications & Information Security Technical Committee, and series editor of IEEE Press/Wiley; he has been IEEE Press editor-in-chief, chair of ComSoc Emerging Technologies, of SPCE Technical Committee, Area-editor of IEEE Communications Magazine, member of IEEE PSPB, and VP of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN), also referred to as content-centric, content-aware or data-oriented networking, is seen as an emerging paradigm that tries to re-focus communications, centering on content access rather than on host-to-host interaction as is the case today. The proliferation of user-generated content and the fact that the vast majority of interactions over the Internet concern media content access has led researchers to think of new communication models in which information/content comes on center stage and is accessed in a location-independent fashion; in addition, the underlying network is aware of the content characteristics and optimizes delivery accordingly. The resulting communications paradigm is receiver-driven, with “time-phased” multicasting and in-network caching being the norm. The network infrastructure becomes more intelligent, with application logic potentially executing within the network in order to support demanding media applications that are not possible today. This presentation will start with an overview of information-centric networking, it will present the state-of-the-art in the relevant research activities and will consider the current state and key challenges.

Since 2008 I am Professor of Communication Networks coordinating activities in networking and network/service management in the Communication and Information Systems Group at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London.

Before that I was for 10 years Professor of Communication and Information Systems, leading the activities of the Networks Research Group in the Centre for Communication Systems Research at the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey.

I hold a Diploma (MEng equivalent) in Electrical & Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at University College London. Before re-joining University College London in the beginning of 2008, I was Professor at Surrey leading research activities in networking and network/service management. Before 1998, I was Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at UCL, leading research activities in the area of network/service management. At both Surrey and UCL I established and led highly successful research teams while I have also been involved in extensive teaching and curriculum development activities. My research interests focus on networking and network & service management and have included aspects such as traffic engineering, quality of service management, self-organised ad hoc/mesh networks, policy-based systems, autonomic networking, information-centric networking, multimedia service control and object-oriented communications middleware. I have published in all these areas and my publications have been extensively cited, for relevant citations see also my Goole Scholar page.

I am on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, the IEEE Communications, the IEEE Communication Surveys & Tutorials and the Springer Journal of Network and System Management. I am also involved in a number of international conference program committees. I have consulted for many communications companies in the UK and Europe and have contributed to standardisation activities in ISO, ITU-T, TMF and IRTF/IETF.

Visual surveillance systems play more and more important roles in many countries for the purpose of public security, although most of these systems just sense environments, send and store videos for online or offline manual observation. Automatic online analysis and alarm is rather difficult because human motion analysis is still a great challenge for complex environments, such as poor illumination, similar backgrounds, object occlusion and various human behaviors. To implement practical intelligent surveillance basing on the above situation, an interactive multimedia platform is designed based on an idea of cooperation between automatic surveillance systems, human observers, mobile robots and cameras for different scenarios. Visual attention models are introduced for security sensitive analysis and vision-audition fusion strategies are proposed for dealing with poor illumination and occlusion. A mobile robot is designed for active vision and active audition for events analysis and all cameras and microphones are networked for event prediction according to their spatial-temporal relations. Lots of indoor and outdoor experiments show that the platform provides us better performances than not only common visual surveillance systems, but also human observation.

Dr. Hong Liu received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Electronics and Automation in 1996, and serves as a full professor in School of EE&CS, Peking University. He is also the director of Center for Networked Intelligent Monitoring System and the director of R&D Office of Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University. His research fields include computer vision and robotics, image processing and pattern recognition. He has finished seven projects of National Natural Science Foundation, five projects of National High-tech Program (863 Program) and National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) besides international cooperation projects. Prof. Liu has published more than 100 papers and gained Chinese National Aero-space Award, Excellence Teaching Award, and Candidates of Top Ten Outstanding Professors, Peking University. He is an IEEE member, vice chair of Intelligent Robotics Society of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligent (CAAI), and also the President of National Youth Committee of CAAI. He has served as co-chairs, session chairs or PC members of many important international conferences, such as IEEE/RSJ IROS, IEEE ROBIO and IEEE SMC, and also serves as reviewers for many international journals such as Pattern Recognition, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing and IEEE Trans. on PAMI.

Images represent the majority of digital information processed by computers and transmitted via networks. Retrieving the desirable images from databases and especially via internet is a challenging problem. In response to this challenge researchers have developed a variety of methods to accomplish good results. Some of these methods for retrieving images use the color, shape and/or size. Some other methods use image analysis, and other use image annotation (automatic or semi-­automatic) techniques.
Lately, semantics-based techniques are used to obtain better results. One category with good results the methods use manual or semi-­‐manual conversion of images into text and then use text-based retrieval technique to obtain the results. In this talk, we present an image retrieval technique based on automatic, semantic annotation of images by converting images into natural language (NL) text, and then applying NL text-based retrieval techniques to obtain the results. The conversion of an image into NL text is accomplished via image filtering, image segmentation, regions synthesis and local global (LG) graphs, recognition of objects, image understanding, and NL text descriptions. The methodology and some results are provided.

Dr. Nikolaos Bourbakis (IEEE Fellow) is an OBR Distinguished Professor of IT and the Director of the Assistive Technologies Research Center (ATRC) at Wright State University, OH. He pursues research in Applied AI, Machine Vision, Bioinformatics & Bioengineering, Assistive Technologies, Information Security, and Parallel- Distributed Processing funded by USA and European government and industry. He has published more than 330 articles in refereed International Journals, book-chapters and Conference Proceedings, and 10 books as an author, co-author or editor. He has graduated 17Ph.Ds and 37 Master students. He is the founder and the EIC of the International Journal on AI Tools, the Editor-in-Charge of a Research Series of Books in AI (WS Publisher), the Founder and General Chair of several International IEEE Computer Society Conferences, Symposia and Workshops, an Associate Editor in several IEEE and International Journals and a Guest Editor in 18 journals special issues. His research work has been internationally recognized and has won several prestigious awards. Some of them are: IBM Author recognition Award 1991, IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Contribution Award 1992, IEEE Outstanding Paper Award ATC 1994, IEEE Computer Society Technical Research Achievement Award 1998, IEEE ICTAI 10 years Research Contribution Award 1999, IEEE Symposium on BIBE Outstanding Leadership Award 2003, ASC Award for Assistive Technology 2005, University of Patras Degree of Recognition 2007.

Prof. Demetri Terzopoulos (PhD '84 MIT) is the Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences. One of the most highly cited authors in engineering and computer science, among his many awards are an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his pioneering research on physics-based computer animation, and the inaugural Computer Vision Significant Researcher Award from the IEEE for his pioneering and sustained research on deformable models and their applications.
Prof. Terzopoulos is listed by ISI and other citation indexes as one of the most highly-cited authors in engineering and computer science. His published work comprises more than 300 scientific publications, primarily in computer vision, computer graphics, medical image analysis, computer-aided design, and artificial intelligence/life, including the volumes Real-Time Computer Vision (Cambridge Univ. Press '94), Animation and Simulation (Springer-Verlag '95), and Deformable Models in Medical Image Analysis (IEEE CS Press '98). His research has received funding from the NSF, DOD, DARPA, IARPA, CIA, US Army, HHMI, National Academies, Okawa Foundation, NSERC Canada, among other organizations and several companies. He has given over 400 invited talks around the world on his research, including approximately 100 distinguished lectures and keynote or plenary addresses.