TITLE: Camouflage in Computer Science
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 25, 2006 6:07 PM
DESC:
-----
BODY:
A couple of months ago,
I mentioned that
I was submitting a proposal to speak at a local conference
on camouflage. The conference is called "CAMOUFLAGE: Art,
Science and Popular Culture" and will be held at my university
on April 22. It is being organized by Roy Behrens, a graphic
design professor here about whom I wrote a bit in that old
entry. My proposal was accepted. You can see a list of
many of the conference speakers on the promotional poster
shown here. (Click on the image to see it full size.)
Behrens has attracted speakers from all over the world,
despite no financial support for anyone. He recently
announced that Marvin Bell, the first Poet Laureate of
Iowa, will open the conference by reading a new poem about
camouflage, especially written for the event, named "Dead
Man". I've enjoyed hearing poets at CS conferences before,
most recently
Robert Hass at OOPSLA,
but usually they've been invited to speak on creativity
or some other "right-brain" topic. I've never been at a
conference with a world-premiere poetry reading... It
should be interesting!
A conference on camouflage run out of a graphics arts
program might seem an odd place for a computer science
professor to speak, but I thought of proposing a talk
almost as soon as I heard about the conference. Computer
scientists use camouflage, too, but with a twist -- as
a way to transmit a message without anyone but the intended
recipient being aware that a message exists. This stands
in contrast to encryption, a technique for concealing
the meaning of a message even as the message may be
publicly known. I've studied encryption a bit in the last
couple of years while preparing for and teaching an
undergraduate course in algorithms, but I've not read
as much on this sort of "computational camouflage", known
more formally as steganography.
This is not an area of research for me, at least yet,
but it has long been an idea that intrigues me. This
audience isn't looking for cutting-edge research in computer
science anyway; they are more interested in the idea of
hiding things via patterns in their surroundings. This
conference affords me a great opportunity to learn more
about steganography and other forms of data hiding -- and
teach a non-technical audience about it at the same time.
If you have ever taught something to beginners, you know that
committing to teach a topic forces you to understand it
at a deeper level than you might otherwise be able to get
away with. For me, this project will be one part studying
computer science, one part educating the public, and one
part learning about an idea bigger than computer science
-- and where CS fits into the picture.
I have titled my talk
NUMB3RS
Meets
The DaVinci Code:
Information Masquerading as Art. (I'm proud of that
title; I hope it's not too kitschy...) I figure I'll show
plenty of examples, in text and images and maybe even
music, and then relate steganography to the idea of
camouflage more generally.
I also figure that I will have a lot of fun writing code!
-----