Editors

Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo received the B.S. degree from the National Taiwan University, Taipei, in 1980 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1985 and 1987, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. From October 1987 to December 1988, he was Computational and Applied Mathematics Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since January 1989, he has been with the University of Southern California (USC). He is presently Director of the Multimedia Communication Lab. and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at USC. His research interests are in the areas of multimedia data compression, communication and networking, multimedia content analysis and modeling, and information forensics and security (refer to http://viola.usc.edu/people/cckuo/ for details).

Dr. Thomas Fang Zheng is a full research professor and Vice Dean of the Research Institute of Information Technology (RIIT), Tsinghua University (THU), and Director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSLT), RIIT, THU. Since 1988, he has been working on speech and language processing. So far, he has published over 230 journal and conference papers, 11 (3 for first author) of which were titled the Excellent Papers, and 11 books. He has been also working on the construction of "Study-Research-Product" channel, devoted himself in transferring speech and language technologies into industries, including language learning, embedded speech recognition, speaker recognition for public security and telephone banking, location-centered intelligent information retrieval service, and so on. Now he holds over 11 patents in various aspects of speech and language technologies (refer to http://cslt.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/~fzheng for details).

Dr. Mauro Barni graduated in electronic engineering at the University of Florence in 1991. He received the PhD in Informatics and Telecommunications in October 1995. He has carried out his research activity for almost 20 years first at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication of the University of Florence, then at the Department of Information Engineering and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Siena where he works as associate Professor. During the last decade, his activity has focused on digital image processing and information security, with particular reference to the application of image processing techniques to copyright protection (digital watermarking) and authentication of multimedia (multimedia forensics). He is currently leading the VIPP (Visual Information Processing and Protection) group of the Telecommunication Laboratory of the Information Engineering Department at the University of Siena (refer to http://clem.dii.unisi.it/~vipp/ for details).