National security remedies among topics at surveillance confab

5th Annual IEEE Conference features 2 professors, 2 students from University of Houston

HOUSTON, Aug. 28, 2008 – Presenting new research about national, home and business security systems and measures, a conference established by a University of Houston professor and his colleagues has become the premier forum for the research community when it comes to surveillance.

Two professors and two students from UH will be at the fifth annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance (AVSS). It will be held Sept. 1-3 in Santa Fe, N.M., at the La Fonda hotel. Participants in the conference include prominent figures in surveillance from academia, government and the high-tech industry.

"This has not only become a major international conference, but also shows the leading role UH plays in a critical research area," said Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at UH. "Surveillance technology and research are intimately related to national security, and we will have sessions where the agendas and programs of government and industrial institutions in the area of surveillance will be laid out."

Fellow UH faculty member Ioannis Kakadiaris, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science, will lead the industrial corporate research session. Here, managers from the corporate labs of IBM, Siemens, Lockheed Martin and Johnson Controls will unveil state-of-the-art surveillance technology, such as that used for threat assessment, massive camera networks, iris recognition and airborne surveillance.

These topics have many applications. IBM will talk about securing companies, homes and retail stores from threats by indentifying suspicious patterns of motion from people or vehicles. Johnson Controls will address issues facing networked security systems that use IP cameras, motion sensors and card readers connected by corporate IT infrastructures. GE will present how its research team has found ways to identify people as they zip through control check points without having to stop to present identification by using a unique biometric that is difficult to fake – the iris. Lockheed Martin will concentrate on airborne surveillance primarily used in military operations to identify targets from manned and unmanned aerial platforms.

In addition to moderating the government panel, Pavlidis will lead the discussion about the "open review" experiment, a concept being introduced for the first time this year at the AVSS conference. This is a radical innovation in the scholarly review process aimed at addressing some of the issues facing the traditional "closed review" system in the jurying process for accepting papers in scholarly journals.

In the "open review" system both the authors and the reviewers know the names of each other, and they communicate openly. Thus, the result is not a one-time verdict from an anonymous higher authority who cannot be debated, as with the "closed review" system. Instead, this proposed open concept is a dialectic process under the moderation of an editor.