Seminar Series

Our 2nd DSS seminar for the 2023-2024 academic year, will be held by Prof. Tiago Falk, on Thursday, November 23rd at 1:30 PM until 3:00 PM in person, in Dupuis Hall AUD (Room G01), located at 19 Division Street, Kingston, ON.

TITLE: Wearables-Based Monitoring of User Behaviour and Mental States in Real and Immersive Settings: Challenges and Opportunities

ABSTRACT:  With the emergence of wearable devices, monitoring human behaviour and mental states in highly ecological settings (i.e., “in the wild”) has become a reality. Such non-controlled settings, however, bring several challenges that need to be overcome, such as movement artifacts, missing data, missing contextual information, and confounding factors (e.g., fatigue and stress), just to name a few. Within immersive experiences, in turn, where the brain is tricked to believe it is physically present in an environment, changes in neural activity due to embodiment and agency could negatively impact existing human factors metrics.

In this talk, I will start by describing work being conducted in the Multisensory Signal Analysis and Enhancement (MuSAE) Lab at INRS-EMT (Montreal) to tackle these challenges. Applications involving the assessment of the mental states of drivers, the functional state of first responders and nurses, and the performance of Argentine tango dancers will be showcased. Next, I will cover some of our more recent work on instrumenting virtual reality headsets with biosensors to allow not only for user monitoring in immersive environments, but to also develop new neuromarkers of user experience, such as metrics of time perception and cybersickness. Lastly, I will describe new applications being developed using multisensory immersive experiences for healthcare and mental well-being.

BIO: Tiago H. Falk received his BSc in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil) in 2022, and his MSc and PhD in ECE from Queen’s University in Kingston in 2005 and 2008, respectively. From 2008-2010 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. In 2010 he joined the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre on Energy, Materials, and Telecommunications (INRS-EMT), University of Québec, as an Assistant Professor. He is now a Full Professor and directs the Multi-sensory Signal Analysis and Enhancement (MuSAE) Lab focused on building next-generation human-machine interfaces for both real and virtual worlds. He is also a founding member of the INRS-UQO Mixed Research Unit on Cybersecurity, where research is being conducted to make human-machine interfaces secure and reliable by tackling emerging vulnerabilities in artificial intelligence algorithms. He is Co-Chair of the Technical Committee (TC) on Brain-Machine Interface Systems of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society, member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society TC on Audio and Acoustics Signal Processing, an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, Member-at-Large of the IEEE SMC Society Board of Governors, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE SMC eNewsletter, a founding member of the IEEE Telepresence Initiative, and served as Academic Chair of the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society.

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Our 1st DSS seminar for the 2023-2024 academic year, will be held by Prof. Rongxing Lu today, on Thursday, September 7th at 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM in person, in Dupuis Hall AUD (Room G01), located at 19 Division Street, Kingston, ON.

TITLE: Toward Privacy-Preserving Aggregate Reverse Skyline Query with Strong Security

ABSTRACT:  It has been witnessed that Aggregate Reverse Skyline (ARS) query has recently received a wide range of practical applications due to its marvelous property of identifying the influence of query requests. Nevertheless, the query users may hesitate to participate in such query services as the query requests and query results may leak sensitive personal data or valuable business data assets to the service providers. To tackle the concerns, a promising solution is to encrypt the query requests, conduct the ARS queries over encrypted query requests without decrypting, and return the encrypted query results. Unfortunately, many existing solutions are either deployed over a two-server model or unable to fully preserve query privacy. In this talk, we present a novel privacy-preserving aggregate reverse skyline query (PPARS) scheme on a single server model while ensuring full query privacy. Specifically, we first transform the problem of ARS query into a combination of set membership test and logical expressions. Then, by employing the prefix encoding technique, bloom filter technique, and fully homomorphic encryption, we run the transformed logical expressions to obtain the encrypted aggregate values without leaking query requests, query results, and access patterns. Furthermore, we propose an interpolation-based packing technique to improve the communication efficiency of PPARS. Detailed and formal security analysis demonstrates that our proposed schemes can guarantee strong security. In addition, extensive experiments are conducted, and the results validate the efficiency of our proposed schemes.

BIO: Rongxing Lu is a Mastercard IoT Research Chair, a University Research Scholar, a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science (FCS), University of New Brunswick (UNB), Canada. Before that, he worked as an assistant professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore from April 2013 to August 2016. Rongxing Lu worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo from May 2012 to April 2013. He was awarded the most prestigious “Governor General’s Gold Medal”, when he received his PhD degree from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2012; and won the 8th IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Asia Pacific (AP) Outstanding Young Researcher Award, in 2013. Dr. Lu is an IEEE Fellow. His research interests include applied cryptography, privacy enhancing technologies, and IoT-Big Data security and privacy. He has published extensively in his areas of expertise (with H-index 85 and citation  31,200+  from Google Scholar as of August 2023), and was the recipient of 10 best (student) paper awards from some reputable journals and conferences. Currently, Dr. Lu serves as the Chair of IEEE ComSoc CIS-TC (Communications and Information Security Technical Committee), and the founding Co-chair of IEEE TEMS Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers Technologies Technical Committee (BDLT-TC). Dr. Lu is the Winner of 2016-17 Excellence in Teaching Award, FCS, UNB.

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