Information Retrieval and Cyber Forensics with Data Science

Dear Colleagues,

The rich formats of digital data and the rapid evolution of data science have provided numerous ways to create digital data on the Internet. Unfortunately, advertisers, hackers, criminals, enemies, and terrorists alike create, alter, forge, or manipulate these digital data for their commercial, political, malicious, or illegal purposes, threatening public safety, societal wellbeing, or even national security. For example, adulterated or forged images and videos may be used for propaganda; unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material violates the owner’s rights; and steganography may be used for illicit cover communications, for carrying malware, or to facilitate scamming or phishing schemes, such as the use of AI-assisted face swap and synthesized voices by cyber criminals, etc.

Social networks have become primary venues for digital data communications, providing a wealth of source material for cyber forensics research. Additionally, the social networks’ connectivity patterns, information diffusion, and influence processes, as well as social bots, are of immense interest in the broader study of digital forensics.

Potential topics of interest for this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

• Social media forensics;
• Tampering detection;
• Multimedia forensics;
• Cybercrime and fraud analysis;
• Mobile forensics;
• Operating systems forensics;
• Network security;
• Computer vision;
• Video surveillance, video search matching, and anomaly detection;
• Security and privacy in virtual and augmented reality applications and games;
• Cloud computing security and forensics;
• Countermeasures to steganography, forgery, covert channels, and other threats to security;
• Biometrics;
• Natural language processing;
• Malware analysis;
• Big data analysis;
• Deep learning and applications;
• Graphic neural network and applications;
• Biomedical informatics;
• AI and applications.

Prof. Dr. Qingzhong Liu
Dr. Bing Zhou
Guest Editors

Technical Program Committee Member:

Name: Prof. Yu Zhang
Email: bullzhangyu@gpnu.edu.cn
Affiliation: Department of Cybersecurity, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, Guangzhou, China
Research Interests: computational intelligence; digital forensics; cybersecurity; malware detection; threat hunting

Name: Dr. Ashar Neyaz
Email: neyaza@wit.edu
Affiliation: School of Computing and Data Science, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, USA
Research Interests: digital forensics; storage media forensics; mobile forensics; cybersecurity; cryptography; network forensics; operating system forensics  

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• cybersecurity
• digital forensics
• data science
• deep learning
• AI
• computer vision
• biometrics