Alumna Zhao Receives IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award

ECE alumna H. Vicky Zhao (Ph.D., '04) was selected to receive the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society's (SPS) 2008 Young Author Best Paper Award. She received the award for a paper she co-authored with her advisor, Prof. K.J. Ray Liu, titled "Behavior Forensics for Scalable Multiuser Collusion: Fairness vs Effectiveness," which appeared in the September 2006 issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

The IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the SPS's technical scope and appearing in one of the society's Transactions. The awarded is given to someone who is less than 30 years of age.

Dr. Zhao will be presented with the award at a ceremony at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2009).

Dr. Zhao currently serves as assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include information security and forensics, multimedia, digital signal processing and communications.

About the Paper:

The past decade witnessed the emergence of large-scale multimedia social network communities such as Napster, Facebook and YouTube, where millions of users form a dynamically changing infrastructure to share and exchange multimedia content. In multimedia social networks, users actively interact with each other, and such dynamics not only influence each individual user but also affect the system performance. It is of critical importance to analyze the impact of human factors on multimedia social networks, and provide important guidelines for better design of multimedia systems.

This paper presents a novel framework to model user dynamics and study behavior forensics in multimedia social networks. It was the first to bring in the concept of human behavior into signal processing. Using multiuser collusion in traitor-tracing fingerprinting as an example, the paper illustrated that human factors have significant impact on multimedia systems, and demonstrated that signal processing can be effectively used to model and analyze user dynamics in multimedia social networks. The paper and the subsequent work by H. Vicky Zhao and K. J. Ray Liu introduced a new paradigm to model user behavior, which combines techniques from multimedia signal processing, statistics, game theory, and digital communications. The paper addressed timely issue of practical importance. Analysis of the interplay among users and investigation of its impact on multimedia systems have recently received a lot of attentions from both academia and industries, and the area of human and social dynamics has recently been identified by US NSF as one of its five priority areas.

Published January 22, 2009