The S+SSPR 2006 Workshop brought together about 100 researchers in pattern recognition and related areas from more than 20 countries at the beautiful campus of the 15-year old Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).   The workshop was held right before the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2006), which was also held in Hong Kong.  It was the fifth time that the SPR and SSPR workshops organized by technical committees TC1 and TC2 of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) were held together.  It was the first time that the joint workshop was held in the Far East.  Considering its current size and participation, S+SSPR is more like a small conference than a workshop.

 

SPR 2006 and SSPR 2006 together received 217 paper submissions from 33 countries.  Of the 217 submissions, 99 were accepted for either oral (38) or poster (61) presentation.  In addition to parallel oral sessions for SPR and SSPR, there were also some joint oral sessions with papers of interest to both the SPR and SSPR communities, such as graph-based methods and feature selection.  A recent trend that has emerged in the pattern recognition and machine learning research communities is the study of graph-based methods that integrate statistical and structural approaches.  Many interesting ideas along this direction were reported in papers in the special session as well as other paper sessions.

 

In addition to presentations by the authors of submitted papers, there were also invited talks presented by four prominent researchers:

¨ “Structural inference of sensor-based measurements” by Robert P.W. Duin of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, winner of the 2006 Pierre Devijver Award;

¨ “Symmetries from uniform space covering in stochastic discrimination” by Tin K. Ho of Bell Laboratories of Lucent Technologies, USA;

¨ “Structured output prediction with support vector machines” by Thorsten Joachims of Cornell University, USA; and

¨ “On the theory and applications of sequence based estimation of independent binomial random variables” by B. John Oommen of Carleton University, Canada. 

All four talks were very well received.

 

A “highlight” of every conference or workshop held in Hong Kong is the banquet.  Our workshop banquet was held in a very nice Chinese restaurant near the scenic Victoria Harbour.  As many workshop participants put it: not only was the quality of the food excellent, its quantity was also sufficient for two full meals.  That probably explains why many people skipped the breakfast on the following day.

 Workshop Report:  S+SSPR 2006