Information Networks and Security Lab

Our group currently consists of two faculty members and several graduate and undergraduate students. We work on a variety of fundamental and application oriented research projects in multimedia, communications, and networking areas. 

The current research and development focus of our group includes cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access networks, wireless security, text mining,  social networks, image/video steganography and steganalysis, and joint source-channel coding, error-resilient coding for wireless networking. We have successfully developed and demonstrated promising technologies in these areas with support from government agencies and industries. If you are interested in supporting our efforts, please feel free to contact one of the faculty members in our group. 

The educational objective of the lab is to train graduate and undergraduate students in multimedia and wireless information technologies. Courses offered by us emphasize on a good mix of theory and hands-on experience. Course projects give students an opportunity to work in teams and design technologies from theory to their implementation.

 

Research project

Research in the lab is focused on cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access networks, wireless security, text mining, social networks, and image/video steganography and steganalysis

 

Video Stegagnography and Steganalysis: YouTube Stego


 
YouTube has become a very important social phenomenon by functioning as a popular portal for video content. It has become ubiquitous and the medium of choice for disseminating user generated video content. Because of its wide popularity, it is important to ask if this medium can be used to communicate secret messages to a wide audience around the globe. We ask and answer the question: is it possible to convey hidden message though this medium. Considering that the videos uploaded to YouTube undergo format conversion as well as compression and that the embedder has no control over or knowledge of the parameters involved in the process, this is a tough challenge.
SpiderRadio Cognitive Network: Dynamic Spectrum Access Network Prototype


 
With recent proliferation in wireless services and increase in the number of end-users, wireless industry is fast moving toward a new wireless networking model where wireless service providers are finding it difficult to satisfy users and increase revenue with just the spectrum statically allocated. Spectrum usage being both space and time dependent, a static allocation often leads to low spectrum utilization and "artificial scarcity" of spectrum. This results in significant amount of "white space" (unused band) available in several spectral bands that could be exploited by both licensed and unlicensed services.
Twitter Analytics: Architecture, Tools and Analysis


 
Twitter is growing into a major social networking platform. Currently, there are several million Twitter users generating huge amounts of text data every minute. Therefore, developing tools to sample Twitter data, analyzing the collected data and drawing conclusions are major challenges.

Text Analystics: detecting deception from text information


 
Deception is falsification of information. Detecting deception from text is a challenging problem. Deceptive text content, for example, may be found in social networking sites, emails scams, email phishing, blogs, chat rooms, etc. Our approach uses a combination of psychology, linguistics and statistical analysis to detect deception. Try it! We do not capture any personal information. The text your enter will be stored for further research.