About Me

Hello! I’m Hyeon Joong Kim, but you can call me Joe. Currently, I am a first-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, working in the Future Sensing and Interaction Lab under the supervision of Dr. Dong Li. I study how multimodal signal processing and machine learning can distinguish real people from AI-generated content by embedding watermarks in authentic human content, so that video call participants can verify they are interacting with a real person.

Research Interests

• Video Watermarking
• Multimodal Signal Processing
• Deepfake Detection
• Computer Vision

Current Projects

Real-Time Multimodal Watermarking for Deepfake Detection in Live Video Calls

Status: In-Progress (Literature Survey Phase)

In early 2024, a finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out about $25 million after joining a video call in which the company’s CFO and other colleagues were all deepfakes. Cases like this show that live video calls can no longer be trusted at face value. My research explores video watermarking as a proactive defense, where authentic content is marked at the source with a fragile watermark so that any tampering can be detected.

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