Seeing the Signals: Applying Signal Processing Tools to Real World Data Analysis Problems

Prof. Antonio Ortega (Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California)

APPLIED SIGNAL PROCESSING SERIES

DATE: 2011-12-15
TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
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ABSTRACT:
Standard signal processing curricula introduce important concepts (sampling, transforms, etc) using as examples datasets that we can all immediately consider as "signals", including for example speech or image processing. The goal of this talk is to show how these traditional signal processing techniques, and new ones that are being developed now, can be applied well beyond what may be considered signals. This is particularly important as we face an era where the cost of acquisition and storage of data continues to drop significantly. A key challenge in coming years is then to develop the tools to extract the most useful and critical information from these datasets: signal processing can play a crucial role to address this challenge.

In this talk we use three examples in our recent work to illustrate how signal processing concepts can be applied to emerging datasets. In the context of network security, we describe a method to "sample" packet arrival information so as to minimize the impact of the drop of information on the detection of denial of service attacks. In the context of an oilfield data analysis scenario, we show how new forms of tomographic reconstruction can be used to estimate oil reservoir characteristics. Finally, we describe our recent work on wavelets on graphs, which enables us to treat datasets defined on arbitrary graphs similarly to standard signals, for example providing a multiresolution representation for these graph signals.
BIO:
Antonio Ortega received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain in 1989 and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, NY in 1994. At Columbia he was supported by a Fulbright scholarship.

In 1994 he joined the Electrical Engineering-Systems department at the University of Southern California (USC), where he is currently a Professor. He currently serves as Associate Chair of EE-Systems and as was previously a director of the Signal and Image Processing Institute at USC. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of ACM. He has been Chair of the Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) technical committee and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2002). He has been technical program co-chair of ICIP 2008, MMSP 1998 and ICME 2002. He has been Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, the IEEE Signal Processing Letters and the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. He received the NSF CAREER award, the 1997 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society 1999 Magazine Award and the 2006 EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing Best Paper Award.

His research interests are in the areas of multimedia compression, communications and signal analysis. His recent work is focusing on distributed compression, multiview coding, error tolerant compression, wavelet-based signal analysis and information representation in wireless sensor networks. His work at USC has been or is being funded by agencies such as NSF, NASA, DOE, as well as a number of companies. 30 PhD students have completed their PhD thesis under his supervision at USC and his work has led to over 250 publications in international conferences and journals.