Jessica Fridrich
Fridrich is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She specializes in all aspects of information hiding in digital imagery, including watermarking for authentication and tamper detection, self-embedding, robust watermarking, steganography and steganalysis, forensic analysis of digital images (detection of forgeries), advanced image processing and encryption techniques.
If you went to my office, you would see a block on a board outside of my door. There is a quotation from Pablo Picasso and it says, "Computers are useless because they only give us answers." And there is a lot of truth in this statement because a lot of great research ideas have started as good, provocative questions. So I always try to teach my students to ask those questions, because they are often 50 percent of the answer. It's not easy to ask them. It sometimes takes guts to ask something impossible. Actually, some of our ideas in the beginning were impossible questions to ask, like, "Can we do this?" Obviously, we can't. But what is it we can do? And then we found out a way actually to do the impossible. So you have to just sometimes become a child and ask very simple and provocative questions. Obviously that make no sense, but that's how you start doing great things, I guess.
