Prof. Adnan Amin, a well respected  and distinguished member of the IAPR community, died Friday, October 28, 2005 in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 54.

Adnan Amin presented his Doctorate D’Etat (D. Sc.) in Computer Science at the University of Nancy, France, in 1985.  Dr. Amin was with the University of Nancy II from 1981 to 1985, first as Assistant Associé (Associated Lecturer), from 1981 to 1982, and then Maitre Assistant Associé (Associated Professor). Between 1985 and 1987 he worked at INTEGRO (Paris) as head of the Pattern Recognition Department. From 1987 to 1990, he was an Assistant Professor at Kuwait University and joined the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1991 as a Senior Lecturer.

Prof. Adnan Amin was an active researcher in the fields of pattern recognition, document image analysis and recognition, neural networks, and machine learning, having authored more than 100 technical papers in these areas.  Among his many research activities, he was a pioneer of the Arabic character recognition systems. As a distinguished and committed member of the IAPR community, Prof. Adnan Amin served as Chair of the IAPR Technical Committees TC2 (Syntactic and Structural Pattern Recognition) and TC11 (Reading Systems). His many contributions to the Pattern Recognition scientific community included the organization of several conferences and workshops, editorial activity in several international journals, involvement in international conferences and workshops as member of program committees, in addition to authoring of scientific publications.

In honor of his memory, I would like to share with you some thoughts written by some of his closest friends.

I am sure we will remember Prof. Adnan Amin as a great researcher and as a good friend.

Ana Fred

Chair of TC1

I had the chance to meet Adnan a few times. He was not only an excellent researcher, his speciality was arabic character recognition, and teacher but also an excellent organizer. I still remember the S+SSPR workshop

he organized 1998 in Sydney before the ICPR in Brisbane. He also put a lot of effort in organizing an excellent social program to provide additional opportunities for informal discussions in addition to the cultural event.

 

The IAPR lost an excellent scientist and a good friend much too early.

 

Walter G. Kropatsch

President of  IAPR

The passing of Adnan is a great loss to the Australian Pattern Recognition Community.  Adnan had a strong presence in document analysis and pattern recognition and had earned the respect of his peers. He served on the board of 5 top journals and on the program committees of numerous international conferences.

My most vivid memory of Adnan is dining with him at the ICPR2000 banquet in the historic Drassanes dining hall in Barcelona. I had not met him before but he invited me to his table and we enjoyed fine conversation throughout the evening. At the end of the banquet, he passed around cigars and the air turned blue. Now I will always remember him in that that haze of smoke. He was a scholar and a friend.

 

Professor Brian C. Lovell

I never forget the enthusiasm Adnan had when we visited The Alhambra, in Grenada, together after ICPR 2000. For Adnan, this was a symbol of his life, I guess - the meeting of Europe and the Middle Eastern cultures. His science also reflected this - the study of systems to recognize and interpret Arabic text and related issue. Adnan was a generous man, a scholar, and he did work hard to make the S+SSPR Workshop what it is today. We remember him for all these things.

Prof. Terry Caelli

Adnan Amin was for a long time our colleague in LORIA lab and a good friend in life. One of us (Abdel) started with Adnan the research on handwriting recognition using structural approaches for Arabic and Latin writing, whereas the second (Jean-Paul) was the supervisor of the Doctorat d’Etat Thesis that he presented on this topic in December 1985. After his departure of Nancy, initially to Kuwait, then to Australia (forced by what happened in Middle East), we had never ceased seeing each other and corresponding. His friendliness, generosity and good-nature are legendary. Like each one among us, we have an unforgettable memory of the various meetings with him.

Adnan was a pioneer on Arabic recognition, he developed IRAC, the first system for off-line Arabic recognition. By this élan, he gave to many researchers the desire to deepen this research area. That explains the numerous citations to his work.

 

Adieu Adnan! Repose en paix.

 

Abdel Belaïd and Jean-Paul Haton