Discreet Signaling: From the Chinese Emperors to the Internet

For thousands of years, humans have sought means to secretly communicate. Today, ad hoc signaling methods are used in applications as varied as digital rights management for multimedia, content identification, authentication, steganography, transaction tracking, and networking. This talk will present an information-theoretic framework for analyzing such problems and designing provably good signaling schemes. Key ingredients of the framework include models for the signals being communicated and the degradations, jammers, eavesdroppers and codebreakers that may be encountered during transmission.
Pierre Moulin received his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1990, after which he joined at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey, as a Research Scientist. In 1996, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor at the Beckman Institute and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and affiliate professor in the Department of Statistics.

His fields of professional interest include image and video processing, compression, statistical signal processing and modeling, media security, decision theory, and information theory.

Dr. Moulin serves or has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is co-founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. He has served IEEE in various other capacities and is currently a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors.

He received a 1997 Career award from the National Science Foundation and an IEEE Signal Processing Society 1997 Senior Best Paper award. He is also co-author (with Juan Liu) of a paper that received an IEEE Signal Processing Society 2002 Young Author Best Paper award. He was 2003 Beckman Associate of UIUC's Center for Advanced Study. He is an IEEE Fellow, recipient of UIUC's 2005 Sony Faculty award, and plenary speaker for ICASSP 2006.