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By the time you receive this newsletter, it will be very close to the 19th Edition of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), to be held in Tampa, USA, on December 8-11, 2008. ICPR is IAPR’s main event and, again this year, has attracted a large number of papers for the conference’s seven tracks. We all look forward to an exciting scientific program and look forward to the opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues and friends from all around the world. Again this year, the ExCo has announced that a number of travel stipends, to the amount of $700US each, were made available to authors of accepted ICPR papers, oral or poster, who would not be able to attend the ICPR without this contribution. The interest in the community was very high and, after careful examination, 40 stipends were given to ICPR authors – most of them PhD students from all around the world. We wish the lucky recipients, and all other authors and participants, a very pleasant and fruitful attendance at ICPR, and we do hope that the money spent in this way will have beneficial scientific impact on the authors’ own research and that of their respective institutions. This year, the Governing Board has approved unanimously the recommendation of the K.S. Fu Prize Committee that the prize be awarded to Professor Anil K. Jain. The committee was impressed by Prof. Jain’s pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of pattern recognition, to computer vision, and to the design of biometric systems. The ExCo extends its warmest congratulations to Prof. Jain. This ICPR will be the second time that the J.K. Aggarwal Prize will be awarded to a young scientist who has brought a substantial contribution to a field that is relevant to the IAPR community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field. This year, the Governing Board has approved unanimously the recommendation of the J.K. Aggarwal Prize committee that the prize be awarded to Professor Song-Chun Zhu for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to a unified foundation for visual pattern conceptualization, modelling, learning, and inference with applications in computer vision and pattern recognition. The ExCo extends its warmest congratulations to Prof. Zhu. The Fellowship Committee has also completed its job and has proposed 18 new IAPR Fellows who will receive their Fellow certificate at ICPR. The number of new Fellows to be elected is based on a percentage (0.25%) of the total membership of IAPR. The Governing Board has recently approved a motion of the ExCo to cancel TC17 on Machine Learning and Data Mining. Initiatives from members of the community for restarting a TC on this important field in pattern recognition are welcome and should be coordinated with IAPR Second Vice-President, Prof. Sergey Ablameyko. We remind Governing Board (GB) members to check the GB reserved area of the IAPR website, where info on the GB meeting is posted. GB members will be informed by email of when the documents will be available in the GB reserved area of the website. No postal mailing of the documents will be done, and GB members are kindly requested to print the material relevant for the GB meeting directly from the IAPR website. This is the last “From the ExCo” column written by the outgoing Executive Committee. We all feel that it has been a pleasure and an honour to serve the IAPR community these last two years, and we wish all the best to the new committee, which will be elected at the Governing Board meeting in Tampa. We look forward to meeting many of you in Tampa. |
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