News

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the 2020 J.K. Aggarwal Prize is Professor Abhinav Gupta, Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,PA, USA.

The citation for the prize is:
“For pioneering contributions to unsupervised and self-supervised
learning in computer vision and robotics.”

The prize will be presented to Professor Gupta prior to his award lecture at ICPR2020 Virtual-Milano, 4 p.m. (CET) on January 12, 2021.

Congratulations to Professor Gupta on this achievement.

Apostolos Antonacopoulos

IAPR President

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the 2020 King-Sun Fu Prize is Professor Ching Yee Suen, Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (CENPARMI), Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The citation for the prize is:
“For pioneering research and exceptional contributions to handwriting recognition and document understanding in theory, practice, and education.”

The prize will be presented to Professor Suen prior to his award lecture at ICPR2020 Virtual-Milano, 1 p.m. (CET) on January 12, 2021.

Congratulations to Professor Suen on this achievement.

Apostolos Antonacopoulos

IAPR President

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the 2020 Maria Petrou Prize is Professor Maja Pantic, Professor of Affective and Behavioral Computing, Imperial College, London, UK, and AI Scientific Research Lead at Facebook London.

The citation for the prize is:
“For contributions to artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in computer vision and machine learning applied to automatic analysis of human faces, machine understanding of human behaviour, and multimodal recognition of human emotions.”

The prize will be presented to Professor Pantic prior to her award lecture at ICPR2020 Virtual-Milano, 1 p.m. (CET) on January 13, 2021.

Congratulations to Professor Pantic on this achievement.

Apostolos Antonacopoulos

IAPR President

The IAPR Executive Committee and the IAPR community were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Thomas Huang, one of the most prominent members of the IAPR family, both in terms of his scientific achievements and his significant service to the organization. Professor Huang received the IAPR’s most prestigious honor in 2002, the K.S. Fu Prize, among several additional awards and medals from other scientific societies. He served as a member of the IAPR Governing Board for 10 years as well a member of a number of Standing Committees. 

Our heartfelt condolences to Professor Huang’s immediate family and to his large extended (research) family and friends whose feeling of loss is matched in magnitude by the positive impact that Professor Huang had on them (see article in the April 2020 issue of the IAPR Newsletter). 

With deep sympathy,

Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR President

It is with great sadness that I write this on behalf of the IAPR Executive Committee and the whole of the IAPR community following the passing of our colleague Reinhard Klette. I would like to express our heartfelt condolences to Reinhard’s family and many friends and colleagues whom he leaves behind too early.

In addition to his deep scientific achievements and impact on early career researchers, Reinhard has contributed wholeheartedly to the work and ethos of the IAPR since its early days. One remarkable feat that is unlikely to ever be replicated is that over his career Reinhard was the key driver (and later GB representative) for two different national associations to join the IAPR (it is very much worth reading about this in the current IAPR Newsletter)! Strongly committed to the IAPR and widely respected, he completed his long service by helping select candidates for the current ExCo as a member of the Nominating Committee (2016-2018).

With deep sympathy,

Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR President

Biennially, at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, the IAPR awards three prestigious prizes and names its Fellows. ICPR 2020 will take place September 13-18, 2020 in Milan, Italy.

Calls for Nominations have been posted at the IAPR website for:

• The King-Sun Fu Prize, Deadlines:  April 5, 2020 (nomination); April 7, 2020 (endorsements)
• The J. K. Aggarwal Prize, Deadline:  May 14, 2020 (all forms)
• The Maria Petrou Prize, Deadline:  April 5, 2020 (all forms)
• The IAPR Fellow Award, Deadline:  January 31, 2020 (all forms)

Newsletter is available in the Publications Section of the IAPR website.

Newsletter Listing

On behalf of the IAPR Executive Committee and the IAPR community as a whole, I’d like to express our heartfelt sympathy to Alfredo’s family and friends. Their loss is also felt deeply by his colleagues at the Parthenope University, the CVPL (the Italian IAPR Member Society of which he was Vice-President), and the members of IAPR societies worldwide with whom he had been actively collaborating.

Alfredo made valuable contributions to the ethos and goals of the IAPR by passionately promoting best practices in Pattern Recognition research, particularly in his excellent work with training the next generations of researchers.

Sincere condolences,

Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR President

The 2012 edition of the TC4 flagship event, the International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) in New Delhi, India, facilitated the establishment of the “IAPR Young Biometrics Investigator Award” (YBIA) with an endowment fund. The objectives and criteria of this award are similar to the prestigious IAPR JK Aggarwal award, except that it will be given to outstanding scientists in the biometrics field.

The recipient of the award will be announced at ICB or IJCB (International Joint Conference on Biometrics) where the winner will be asked to deliver a plenary talk.

For nomination forms and more information, please visit the IAPR Young Biometrics Investigator Award page.

Call for Proposals to Host the 2020 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB2020):

Deadline: January 15, 2019

The IAPR Technical Committee on Biometrics (TC-4) and the IEEE Biometrics Council (IEEE-BC) are pleased to invite proposals for hosting the 2020 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2020) in the United States.

The IJCB combines two major biometrics annual research conferences – International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) and Biometrics Theory, Application and Systems (BTAS) conference – and is held in the United States. Similar events were held in 2011 (http://www.cse.nd.edu/IJCB_11/), 2014 (http://ijcb2014.org/) and 2017 (http://www.ijcb2017.org/ijcb2017/index.php), and proved to be successful as evidenced by the number of paper submissions and delegates in attendance.

The full Call for Proposals can be found here: https://www.cse.msu.edu/~rossarun/IJCB-2020-CFB_final_revised.pdf