The objective of the Second International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (PReMI'07) was to present the state-of-the-art scientific results, encourage academic and industrial interaction, and promote collaborative research in pattern recognition, machine intelligence, and related fields, involving scientists, engineers, professionals, researchers, and students from India and abroad. Particular emphasis of PReMI'07 was placed on data mining, soft computing, bioinformatics, biometrics, video and image analysis as well as various upcoming pattern recognition/image processing problems.

 

The conference had one plenary talk, two keynote speeches and seven invited lecturers, all by very eminent and distinguished researchers from around the world. Professor S. K. Mitra (University of California, USA) delivered the Plenary Talk of the conference. Two key note speeches were given by Professors N. Nasrabadi (U.S. Army Research Laboratory, USA) and N. Zhong (Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan). Invited talks were delivered by Professors V. D. Gesu (University of Palermo, Italy), S. B. Cho (Yonsei University, Korea), L. Bruzzone (University of Trento, Italy), A. Tepavcevic (University of Novi Sad, Serbia), G. Wang (Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications,

China), B. Lovell (NICTA and The University of Queensland, Australia), and M. Nachtegael (Ghent University, Belgium). The conference had 12 contributory sessions and two poster sessions. It also had two days of  pre-conference tutorial talks.

 

The conference had a very good response in terms of paper submission. It received 241 submissions from about 20 countries spanning six continents. Each paper was critically reviewed by experts in the field, after which 76 papers were accepted for inclusion in the proceedings. Finally the conference was attended by 60 registered participants from 11 countries, invited guests and a large number of students.

 

The conference proceedings of PReMI-07, containing rigorously reviewed papers, was published by Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg under the prestigious series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)(volume 4815). In this connection, a post-conference edited volume, tentatively titled “Machine Interpretation of Patterns: Image Analysis, Data Mining and Bioinformatics" (Eds. R. K. De, A. Ghosh and D. P. Mandal), is planned to be published from World Scientific Press, Singapore, containing a few chapters which are expanded versions of contributory papers of the conference and a few chapters contributed by some of the program committee members and invited speakers.

 

PReMI-07 had a special significance, as it coincided with the year of Platinum Jubilee Celebration of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). The Institute was founded on December 17, 1931 by Prof. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, a great visionary and a great believer of interdisciplinary research integrating statistics with natural and social sciences.

 

Various professional sponsors and funding agencies (both national and international) came forward to support this event for its success. These include, DST Sponsored Center for Soft Computing Research at ISI, Kolkata; International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR); Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC); International Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics (CIMPA), France; Yahoo! India Research & Development; and Philips Research Asia - Bangalore.

Conference Report:  PReMI ‘07