Introduction to Professor Pawel Korus and His Lab at New York University
- Could you briefly introduce yourself (and your University/Lab)?
I’m a researcher working on problems related to media integrity and visual manipulation. I’m currently a research professor working with Nasir Memon at New York University. More information about my work can be found on my website (https://pkorus.pl/) and github (https://github.com/pkorus/).
- What have been your most significant research contributions up to now?
My most significant contributions until now were: 1) an effective communication-theoretic model for content reconstruction in digital watermarking, 2) a multi-scale forensic analysis protocol that improves photo manipulation detection by combining the benefits of small-scale and large-scale analysis. I’m currently looking into end-to-end simulation of photo acquisition and distribution to assess joint optimization opportunities (https://github.com/pkorus/neural-imaging). We’re building an open source simulation environment that people can use for various applications.
- What problems in your research field deserve more attention (or what problems will you like to solve) in the next few years, and why?
I believe proactive techniques for media protection / verification deserve more attention. There are several standardization attempts (JPEG Fake Media, Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative) which aim to provide meta-data for integrity and provenance tracking. But is encrypted meta-data enough to address the problem?
- What advice would you like to give to the young generation of researchers/engineers?
Work on problems you enjoy doing.