I believe that the IAPR is an excellent organisation, so I have always felt very privileged to serve in any way. So, it is indeed a great honour for me to serve as IAPR President for 2008-2010. I am also privileged to have a wonderful ExCo team with both enthusiasm and experience, and I look forward to great outcomes in the coming months.

The ExCo made a good start at the first meeting in Tampa where we drafted the new committee memberships. 

These committees are now almost complete and some are already very active with their tasks.  The standing committees take on much of the workload of the IAPR, and their activities keep the organisation healthy and facilitate change. We have encouraged younger members by recruiting new people, including recent fellows. As a society we need to build the new generation of future leaders, and committee service is an excellent introduction to IAPR activities.

The IAPR has a long history but memories of the early years are fading, and there are few founding members left to recall events.  Through the Advisory Committee we are making a concerted effort to collect and collate this information before it is lost.  There was a history page on the old IAPR website, but there is very little information on the current site.  If members do have any information about the early days that they wish to share please contact the committee.

Another task of the Advisory Committee is to decide what to do when there are breeches of the IAPR policies on ethics.  For example, at ICPR2008 in Tampa some people registered but did not attend the conference and also did not inform the organisers. This is quite unacceptable and resulted in some embarrassing holes in the oral program.  At ICPR2008, the problem was exacerbated by a clash with the NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, but there is still no excuse for not informing the organisers of absence. So the IAPR needs to not only state a policy on ethics, it needs to encourage professional ethics by fair and practical mechanisms to reduce the impact of such poor behaviour on its events and publications. These policies will be developed over the coming months and will be discussed with the Governing Board before release on the IAPR website in time for ICPR2010 in Istanbul.

At the last Governing Board meeting it was decided that the ICPR Standing Committee will take a much stronger role in ensuring the quality of future ICPRs. The Standing Committee will take a leadership role in technical quality, so the bid team can concentrate on local organisation. This will effect the shape of future ICPR bids, so the relevant committees are revising the ICPR bid guidelines accordingly.

There will be a two-day ExCo meeting in Nancy on the 15th and 16th of July to discuss IAPR issues in detail and obtain early feedback from the committees. I will report on this in a future letter.

As with any organisation, the Newsletter serves a major role as the major contact for our membership. So, finally, I wish to thank Larry O'Gorman our former Newsletter editor and congratulate Alexandra Albu as incoming editor (see article in January 2009 issue). 

 

Regards,

Brian Lovell, President of the IAPR

Professor Brian C. Lovell (Australia)

Do you have information about IAPR’s history?

 

 

 

Contact the

Advisory Committee

 

Herb Freeman, Chair

hfreeman@comcast.net

See related article in this issue,

 

News from the IAPR Executive Committee