Text Box: News from the 
IAPR 
Executive Committee

By Denis Laurendeau

By the time you receive this newsletter, members of the IAPR community prepare for the 18th Edition of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), to be held in Hong Kong, China, on August 20-24. ICPR is IAPR’s main event and, again this year, is attracting a large number of papers in the conference’s five tracks. We all look forward to an exciting scientific program and, as it has now become a tradition, to an opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues and friends from all around the world.

 

Again this year, the ExCo has announced that a number of travel stipends, to the amount of 700$US, were made available to authors of accepted ICPR papers, oral or poster, who would not be able to attend the ICPR without this contribution. Clearly, the interest was overwhelming since 199 applications were received and, after careful examination, 40 stipends were given to ICPR authors – most of them PhD students – from the following countries: China, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Russia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Mexico, Iran, Canada, Australia, UK, Spain, and the USA. We wish the lucky recipients, but also all other authors and participants, a very pleasant and fruitful attendance at ICPR, and we do hope that the money spent in this way will have a good scientific impact on the authors’ own research and that of their respective institutions.

 

As you will probably read elsewhere in this newsletter, The K.S. Fu Prize Committee unanimously recommended Professor Josef Kittler to receive this year's K.S. Fu Prize. The committee was impressed by Prof. Kittler’s rigorous and systematic application of probability theory for developing new approaches and methodologies in pattern recognition and image processing. The Governing Board approved this nomination by a unanimous vote. The ExCo extends its warmest congratulations to Prof. Kittler.

 

This year is the first year that the new IAPR J-K Aggarwal Prize is given to a young scientist who has brought a substantial contribution to a field that is relevant to the IAPR community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field.  The Governing Board approved the creation of the J-K Aggarwal Prize by majority vote. The J-K Aggarwal Prize Committee unanimously recommended Professor Bernhard Schölkopf to receive this year’s J-K Aggarwal Prize for popularizing and advancing the field of kernel methods and for showing its broad applicability to pattern recognition problems. The ExCo extends its warmest congratulations to Prof. Scholkopf.

 

The Fellowship Committee has also finished its job and has proposed 15 new IAPR Fellows, who will receive their Fellow certificate at ICPR. The number of new Fellows to be elected is based on a percentage (0.25%) of the total membership of IAPR. More than 29 nominations for valuable candidates were submitted. The ExCo warmly invites the nominators to present next time updated nominations of candidates who were not elected this year. 

 

We remind GB-members to check the GB-reserved area of the IAPR website, where info on the GB-meeting is posted. GB-members will be informed of when the documents will be available in the GB-reserved area of the website. No mailing of the document will be done, and GB-members are kindly requested to print the material relevant for the GB-meeting directly from the IAPR website.

 

This is the last “From the ExCo” column written by the outgoing Executive Committee. We all feel that it has been a pleasure and an honour to serve the IAPR community these last two years, and we wish all the best to the new committee, which will be elected at the Governing Board meeting in Hong Kong.

 

We look forward to meeting many of you in Hong Kong.

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