ITM students win best paper at 2014 SIGITE and 2 other student groups presented their papers

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Congratulations to ITM students Maya Embar, Louis McHugh and Bill Wesselman. Their project, Printer Watermark Obfuscation, won the Best Paper award at the ACM Special Interest Group of Information Technology Education (SIGITE) in Research in Information Technology (RIIT). Their project started in ITM Industry Professor of Information Technology and Management, William Lidinsky’s ITMS 548 and ITM 549 courses. In addition, ITM undergraduate student Steve Martin was a First Semester Team Member and derived the original concept for the paper.

The group submitted research and development of a technological implementation that has never been done before. Although Printer Watermark Tracking technology has been around for about 30 years, this is the first time anyone has determined, documented and implemented a way to obfuscate the yellow dots and render the tracking watermarks useless.

This is the first time Illinois Institute of Technology students have won this award. This marks the second year in a row that members of the School of Applied Technology have received this award; last year’s winner was C. Robert Carlson, dean of School of Applied Technology.

Also participating in the 2014 SIGITE conference were: C. Robert Carlson, dean of School of Applied Technology; Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair, Information Technology and Management degree programs and Industry Professor of Information Technology and Management; Ben Khodja, Cyber Forensics and Security graduate student presented Probabilistically Detecting Steganography within MP3 Files; and David Stacey, Cyber Forensics and Security graduate student, presented Passive Warden Using Statistical Steganalysis.

The 15th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education and the 3rd Annual Conference on Research in Information Technology (RIIT) was hosted by Southern Polytechnic State University October 16-18, 2014. The theme of both conferences was “Riding the Wave of Change in Information Technology.” The Conference sought submissions that addressed ways for academia, government and business to anticipate, navigate and adapt to the ever-evolving nature of IT.

The call for participation attracted 111 submissions, 72 of which were submitted to SIGITE and 39 to RIIT. Both numbers represent a larger pool than in recent years, demonstrating the conferences are of great interest in the community. Ninety-five of the submissions were papers, with 59 papers submitted to SIGITE and 36 papers submitted to RIIT. SIGITE has 27 papers in its program for an acceptance rate of 46% and RIIT has 14 papers for an acceptance rate of 39%. All of the IIT authors should be congratulated on their excellent work.

Printer Watermark Obfuscation paper submitted by Embar, McHugh and Wesselman can be seen at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2656437

Probabilistically Detecting Steganography within MP3 Files paper submitted by Khodja can be seen at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2656438

Passive Warden Using Statistical Steganalysis paper submitted by Stacey can be seen at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2659756