DAS

A successful Ninth IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems was held in Boston, Massachusetts, a location situated in the heart of beautiful New England in the northeastern United States. Nearly 100 members of the international research community gathered to attend what has become one of the signature events for TC-11.

DAS 2010 is the ninth workshop in a series. The first DAS was held in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1994, and was followed by Malvern, PA (1996); Nagano, Japan (1998); Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2000); Princeton, NJ (2002); Florence, Italy (2004); Nelson, New Zealand (2006) and Nara, Japan (2008). Boston, with its rich history dating back to the 1600’s and its role as a major focal point in the history of the American Revolution and America's fight for independence, proved to be an ideal location for the 2010 workshop. Boston attracts millions of visitors each year as a center for industrial, academic and cultural excellence, and there is no doubt this proved one the attractions for DAS 2010.

The DAS tradition is to bring together industry, academic, and government researchers interested in many aspects of document analysis systems and to provide opportunities for fruitful interaction and collaboration. This year's workshop was organized as a three-day, single track event, with oral and poster presentations, as well as Working Group discussions on the second and third afternoons. Special sessions on contributed datasets and a keynote talk by George Nagy on this same topic provided a compelling theme – a focus that will hopefully help guide the field toward greater sharing of data and accepted standards for evaluation. This year, we received 91 submissions from 25 countries on six continents. The papers were reviewed by 45 members of our research community and an international program committee representing 16 different countries. The overall quality was excellent and the workshop co-chairs chose 28 full papers for oral presentation and 37 as poster papers, as well as 15 short papers that were presented either as posters or in a special short oral format. In addition, six groups presented live demos during the poster sessions. There were 99 paid registrations of all kinds (students were offered a lower rate to encourage their attendance).

Full papers underwent the standard peer review process and appear in the official workshop proceedings published in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series.

All papers, including short papers, were included in the unofficial hardcopy proceedings distributed at the event, with short paper authors also given the option of having their papers appear on the DAS 2010 website. In addition, we have announced a call for PowerPoint slides and posters from the workshop and, if authors choose, we will place these materials on the website as well.

George Nagy, a founding father in the field of Document Image Analysis, kicked-off the workshop with an entertaining and thought-provoking keynote talk entitled “Document Systems Analysis: Testing, Testing, Testing.” His PowerPoint slides appear on the DAS website at the following URL: cubs.buffalo.edu/DAS2010/GN_testing_DAS_10.pdf

The IAPR Nakano Award for the best paper at the workshop was announced at the banquet and presented to Masakazu Iwamura, Tomohiko Tsuji, and Koichi Kise for their paper “Memory-Based Recognition of Camera-Captured Characters.” This award was established in memory of the late Professor Yasuaki Nakano, the honorary chair of the DAS 2008 workshop and the general chair of DAS 1998, and includes an engraved trophy, certificates for each of the co-authors, and a $1,000 prize from a special fund established separately for this purpose.

The IAPR Best Student Paper Award was given to Mudit Agrawal for his paper coauthored with David Doermann titled “Context-Aware and Content-Based Dynamic Voronoi Page Segmentation,” with Honorable Mention going to Pingping Xiu for his paper co-authored with Henry Baird titled “Analysis of Whole-Book Recognition.” Each student winner received a printed certificate, with Mudit Agrawal receiving a $400 prize and Pingping Xiu receiving a $200 prize, both supported through partial use of the IAPR levy.

As with past DAS workshops, an important feature of DAS 2010 was the lively Working Group discussions, this time led by Marcus Liwicki. The scribes and the moderators of the Working Groups are currently writing up their reports in collaboration with group members. When finished, full reports for each Working Group will be posted on the DAS website, with a summary version prepared for a special issue of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, which will also include journal-length versions of selected papers chosen from those presented at the workshop.

Socially, the local organizers arranged an exciting set of activities including an opening reception, a duck boat tour of Boston and its harbor, and a banquet at the “Top of the Hub” overlooking the city. Raytheon BBN Technologies and Hitachi provided generous financial support for the DAS 2010 workshop.

The broad consensus from attendees is that DAS 2010 was a great success.

Workshop Report: DAS 2010

Report prepared by:

Daniel Lopresti