Feature Article

Feature

IRHPA (Intensification of Research in High Priority Areas) is a complementary program to the SERC (Science and Engineering Research Council) program of the DST (Department of Science and Technology), Government of India, with activities consisting of setting up groups around an eminent scientist and major national facility to focus research activities in these areas. The scheme has contributed to augment general R&D capabilities at academic institutions and national laboratories.

One of the groups that has been set up by the IRPHA program is the Center for Soft Computing Research at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. The center is aimed at conducting research both theoretical and applied, of international standard, in the fields of soft computing and machine intelligence. The Center was formally inaugurated by Prof. M. G. K. Menon on 25 October 2005.

The Center focuses mainly on basic research and, to some extent, on manpower development, keeping in mind that the research excellence is the main objective. The activities of the center include:

● Conducting basic research in pattern recognition, image processing, data mining, computer vision, video image processing, fuzzy sets, rough sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms, wavelets, support vector machines, fractals, hybrid techniques etc.

● Demonstrating applications to some focused areas like web mining (e.g., page ranking, personalization etc.), bioinformatics (e.g., protein structure analysis), medical image (e.g., ultrasonographic and MRI) analysis, and VLSI layout design, to be decided time to time,

● Developing manpower : (i) imparting training to researchers/students from industry and academia including R&D labs; (ii) disseminating teaching and training material for distance education using multimedia and video facilities; and (iii) offering regular short term advanced courses on upcoming research areas,

● Organizing seminars/workshops/schools by eminent faculty from abroad and India,

● Providing a forum of exchanging ideas or establishing a linkage among scientists of leading institutions and industry working in similar areas by inviting interested faculty/research personnel,

● Providing fellowships for helping faculty and scholars from less endowed institutions, especially from neighboring regions.

With these objectives in mind, the Center is involved in the following ongoing research activities:

● Bioinformatics and Data Mining

Þ Bi-clustering

Þ Microarray data analysis

Þ Rough-fuzzy clustering

Þ Swam Intelligence

● Image Processing and Vision

Þ Cognitive vision

Þ Rough set based segmentation and feature detection

● Logic and games

● Medical Image Processing

Þ Identification of fatty livers from ultrasound images

● Nonmonotonic reasoning and belief revision

● VLSI and image processing architecture

● Web Intelligence and Mining

Þ Web page classification

Þ Advanced crawling techniques

Þ Web services categorization

Þ Text categorization

In the interest of providing a forum for the exchange of ideas, the Center has undertaken two collaborative projects. Debasis Majumdar and Soma Mitra, CDAC, Ministry of IT, Govt.of India, Kolkata, are the investigators on the project “Automatic Feature Detection and Pose Recovery for Faces”; P. K. Nanda and Priyadarshi Kanungo, Dept.of Electrical Engineering, REC Rourkela, Orissa, on “Object Detection and Object Recognition Using Deformable and Evolving Models”.

For more information, contact the Center at scc@isical.ac.in.