Anthony TS Ho

Professor Anthony T.S. Ho (何东旋教授) was born in Hong Kong. He joined the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, UK in 2006. He is Chair Professor of Multimedia Security and was Head of Department of Computer Science from 2010 to 2015. Prior to that, he was Deputy Head of Department of Computer Science from 2008 to 2010. Tony was the recipient of the prestigious Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) under the Security category for his research and commercialization work on digital watermarking in 2006. Under his leadership, Surrey Computer Science has been ranked four consecutive years as one of the top 150 Computer Science Departments in the World by ARWU2015, ARWU 2014, ARWU 2013 and ARWU 2012 in terms of research quality. In addition, for teaching quality, the department achieved overall improvement in a positive trajectory from 26th in 2011 to 8th in 2016 ranked by the Guardian League Table, maintaining its poistion in the top quartite band of over 100 UK universities. While as Head of Department, Tony was instrumental and served as a leading core member of the International team that successfully won the bid to host the flagship IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2019 in Brighton, UK. This successful event attracted almost 3000 international delegates across the globe.

Tony obtained his BSc(Hons) in Physical Electronics from Northumbria University in 1979, his MSc in Applied Optics from Imperial College London in 1980 and his PhD in Digital Image Processing from King's College London in 1983. After graduation, he worked in various senior technical/management positions in industry for 11 years in the UK and Canada. His first job was at ERA Technology, first as Senior Engineer and then Principal Engineer, where he actively involved in the research and development of target detection and identification algorithms for a pioneering subsurface radar system for plastic anti-personnel and anti-tank mine clearance in the Falklands. He moved to Vancouver, Canada in 1987 and worked as a Project Leader for MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), involved in the delivery and installation of a satellite remote sensing image processing system for application in forestry monitoring and classification . From 1994 to 2005, he was a Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. While at NTU, he co-founded and became CEO of DataMark Technologies (DMT) in 1998, a company specialised in digital watermarking and steganography. DMT later became a subsidiary of Singapore Technologies Engineering, one of the largest engineering companies listed on the stock exchange in Singapore.

Tony has published more than 170 articles in international journals and conference proceedings including 8 international patents granted related to watermarking and steganography. He received a best paper award for a co-authored conference paper on camera model identification from IEVC 2012. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA) with Impact factor: 2.327 (2019), and the journal was recently ranked one of the top 20 international security journals by Google Scholar. He is also an Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication both this journal and JISA are published by Elsevier. In addition, Tony is an Associate Editor for EURASIP Journal of Image and Video Processing. Tony was appointed as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) from 2016 to 2020 and served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2014 to 2016. He was appointed as an Associate Editor/Editorial Board member for APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing as well as a new international open access journal, Array, published by Elsevier . Tony is co-editor of a book on "Handbook of Digital Forensics of Multimedia Data and Devices" published by IEEE Press/Wiley in September 2015.

Tony was invited keynote speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Infocomm Technology (ICAIT) 2010, 1st ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IHMMSec'2013), International Symposium on Information Technology Convergence (ISITC) 2015, 10th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS) 2016, IEEE 1st International Conference on Next Generation Computer Applications (NextComp 2017), 16th International Workshop on Digital Forensics and Watermarking (IWDW2017), 4th International Conference on Mathematics and Computing (ICMC2018), 2nd Information Communication Technology and Society Conference (ICTAS2018), International Symposium on Information Technology Convergence (ISITC 2018). Tony also presented a keynote at the 5th International Conference on Mathematics and Computing (ICMC 2019) in February 2019 in Bhubaneswar, India and at the International Symposium on Information Technology Convergence (ISITC) 2019 in September 2019 in Tianjin, China.

In August 2016, Tony was awarded the prestigious Tianjin Distinguished Professorship by the Tianjin Municipal Commission of Education for 4 years. His Visiting Professorship will be hosted by the Tianjin University of Science and Technology. He is also a Visiting Professor (2014-present) at Wuhan University of Technology, China and the University of Malaya appointed him as a Visiting Professor (2018-2019), as well as External Assessor, Academic Promotion (2018 - 2021). He was external examiner (2013-2016) for the University of Mauritius for their BSc Computer Science programmes and external examiner for Coventry University for their BSc Business Information Technology programme (2016 - 2020). He served as General Co-Chair for the 5th International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data (SocialSec 2019) in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2019 and served as General Co-Chair for the 2nd International Workshop on Attacks and Defenses for Internet-of-Things (ADIoT 2019) in Luxembourg in September 2019.

Tony is a Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), Fellow of Institute of Physics (FInstP) and Fellow of British Computer Society (FBCS). He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and a Chartered Physicist (CPhys). In his spare time, Tony enjoys travelling, playing badminton and learning to play the guitar.

Research interests

Tony's research interests are in multimedia security, Benford's law applications, digital watermarking, steganalysis, image forensics, satellite remote sensing, image processing and UWB radar target detection and identification.

Research Funding

• Li, S., Ho, A.T.S., "POLARBEAR - Pattern Of Life ANPR Behaviour Extraction Analysis and Recognition," funded by the Innovate UK - Technology Strategy Board (TSB) through its Collaborative R&D Competition 'Data exploration - creating new insight and value', funding amount £329,453 (Surrey share £149,349), duration 1 October 2014 - 31 March 2016
• Co-funded project partners: Thales UK Ltd, HPC Wales; unfunded project collaborator: Surrey Police
• Li, S., Ho, A.T.S., "A novel scheme for countering unauthorised usage of digital media content," funded by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) through the Innovate UK - Technology Strategy Board (TSB)'s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), funding amount £157,937 (£83,529 for Phase II and £74,408 for Phase III), duration 1 June 2013 - 31 January 2014 for Phase II and 1 October 2014 - 31 March 2015 for Phase III
• Phase I is the bidding phase, and Phases II and III are the the two phases the project work was/is done.
• Li, S., Ho, A.T.S., Cruickshank H., and Sun Z., "Mobile Magic Mirror (M3): Steganography and Cryptography on the move," funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) through the Innovate UK - Technology Strategy Board (TSB)'s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), funding amount and duration undisclosed, 2014
• Li, S., Ho, A.T.S., Dahmi, M.K., "Forensic vehicle convoy analysis for investigating organised crime," funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through MILES - Models and Mathematics in LifE and Social Sciences (EP/I000992/1), funding amount £10,561, duration 1 March 2013 - 20 December 2013
• Unfunded project collaborator: Surrey Police
• Wang, W., Ho, A.T.S., Li, S., and Dahmi, M.K.,"Audio-visual cues based attention switching for machine listening," funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through MILES - Models and Mathematics in LifE and Social Sciences (EP/I000992/1), funding amount £9,499.60, duration 1 December 2012 - 20 December 2013
• Dahmi, M.K., Ho A.T.S., Li, S., "Digital forensics: scenarios and standards," funded by the UK's Home Office (HOS/11/038), funding amount £32,511, duration 1 December 2011 - 31 May 2012