New problems in signal processing for mobile communications
Prof. Erik G. Larsson, Linköping University, Sweden
EURASIP Fellow inaugural lecture
Abstract
I will start with a retrospect of how signal processing has made modern mobile communications, and especially MIMO in 5G, possible. While this technology is already very good, several challenges remain: especially, coverage holes, and difficulties to send multiple streams to multiple-antenna users because of insufficient channel rank. Perhaps the ultimate solution is distributed MIMO (also known as cell-free massive MIMO). But while this is at heart a powerful technology, unless the phase oscillators between different access points are mutually locked, achieving accurate phase-alignment for coherent multiuser beamforming on downlink is difficult. Another emerging technology is to deploy swarms of network-controlled repeaters, which could be built and installed cheaply, but require new types of coordination and give rise to new signal processing problems. I will illuminate the fundamental limits of these emerging technologies, and the signal processing tools needed to understand and optimize them.
Erik G. Larsson is Professor at Linköping University, Sweden, and a Fellow of the IEEE and EURASIP. He co-authored Fundamentals of Massive MIMO (Cambridge, 2016) and Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications (Cambridge, 2003). Recent service includes membership of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Awards Board (2017–2019), the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine editorial board (2018–2021), and the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications steering committee (2019–2022). He received the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award twice, in 2012 and 2014, the IEEE ComSoc Stephen O. Rice Prize in Communications Theory 2015, the IEEE ComSoc Leonard G. Abraham Prize 2017, the IEEE ComSoc Best Tutorial Paper Award 2018, the IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Prize in 2019, and the IEEE SPS Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award in 2023.
Trusted Pixels: Charting the Role of Images in the AI Age
Prof. Mauro Barni, University of Siena, Italy
Abstract
The AI revolution and the widespread adoption of advanced generative models are profoundly altering the role of images and other media within our society, with a steady decline in the trust traditionally placed in images as faithful and objective representations of reality. The initial response to this shift was (and still is) a vigorous pursuit of tools capable of discerning real from synthetic images, in an effort to establish whether an image can be trusted or not. This has given rise to a new field, broadly known as multimedia forensics, which has attracted increasing interest from researchers, with a strong focus on the development of methods for distinguishing authentic and fake images (whatever this may mean). In this speech, I will argue that as AI technology evolves, the distinction between real and AI-generated images will increasingly become an ill-posed problem, and that the implications of the AI revolution are likely to be far more profound than currently anticipated. This will compel researchers to recalibrate their objectives to better answer the challenges set by the AI media revolution. Such a recalibration will be essential to adequately address the challenges presented by the AI-driven media landscape, enabling us to understand and potentially guide the role that images and other media play in supporting a healthy progress of our society.
Mauro Barni is full professor at the University of Siena, where he funded the Visual Information Processing and Protection group (VIPP). Throughout his career he has been studying the application of image and signal processing for security applications. His current research interests include multimedia forensics, adversarial machine learning and DNN watermarking. He published about 350 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He participated to several projects funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, the European Commission, DARPA and AFRL on diverse topics, including digital watermarking, information security, signal processing in the encrypted domain, multimedia forensics, machine learning and AI security. He has been the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security for the years 2015-2017. He was the funding editor of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security. He has been the chairman of the IEEE Information Forensic and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC). He was the technical program chair of ICASSP 2014. He was appointed DL of the IEEE SPS for the years 2013-2014. He is the recipient of the Individual Technical Achievement Award of EURASIP for 2016. He is a fellow member of the IEEE, EURASIP and the AAIA.