ExCo

We hope that you enjoyed the last ICPR in Tampa Bay. The conference was a great success and offered the IAPR community an excellent opportunity to meet and exchange ideas on topics related to pattern recognition. Congratulations to the ICPR 2008 Organizing Committee for preparing the conference. We now wish good luck to the ICPR 2010 Organizing Committee. ICPR 2010 will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, on August 23-26, 2010. This ICPR will have a special meaning since it will be the 20^th anniversary of IAPR’s main event. Tsukuba Science City, Japan, has been selected by the Governing Board as the venue for ICPR 2012. In order to reduce the workload of the organizers, the IAPR Governing Board has approved a motion for using a professional software package for managing the conference that should help in making the organizing process easier.

This is the first “From the ExCo” column written by the new Executive Committee. The newly appointed ExCo started immediately to work on a number of issues. As usual, an urgent task in the months after ICPR is to set up the standing committees and to appoint new chairpersons to TCs with outgoing chairs for this new term. Again, the ExCo will encourage Technical Committees to appoint vice chairs, the idea being to favor continuity from one term to the other, to enhance diversity in geographical distribution, and to involve young scientists in the life of the committees.

According to IAPR’s constitution and bylaws, the Nominating Committee, the KS Fu Prize Committee, and the J.K. Aggarwal Prize Committee need a vote by the Governing Board. The ballot will be initiated soon and we will report on its result in a future issue of the newsletter. For all committees, please refer to the association’s web page, www.iapr.org, for the latest update of the IAPR directory, with the names and contact information of all the standing committee members.

The Governing Board meeting in Tampa voted a few amendments to the IAPR's Constitution, Bylaws and Statutes. This will be incorporated very soon into the text which can be found on the association's web site.

At the GB meeting in Tampa, the creation of a new Technical Committee on Computational Forensics, TC6, which was presented by Dr. Katrin Franke, has been approved by the GB.

The IAPR financial situation is good and will allow the policy of issuing stipends to help with travel expenses to the ICPR to continue, with an expected increase in the number of stipends for 2010. Again this year for the ICPR in Tampa, researchers, most of them young scientists, benefited from this support.

The ExCo would like to express its sincere thanks to Larry O’Gorman for the excellent work he has done over the past years as editor of the Newsletter. Larry has managed the transition from paper support to full electronic support efficiently and has given the newsletter a new flavor that has been very much appreciated by the IAPR community. Dr. Alexandra Branzan Albu, from the University of Victoria, Canada, will be the new editor of the Newsletter (see related article) in replacement of Larry.

We also extend our warmest thanks to Walter Kropatsch, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Sergey Ablameyko for their work as members of the ExCo. Although they are no longer ExCo members, we are convinced that they will still participate very actively in IAPR activities. Their contribution to the association is invaluable, and we hope that it will continue for a long time ahead.

The new members of the ExCo, Brian C. Lovell (President), Apostolos Antonacopoulos (1st Vice-President), Ingela Nyström (2nd Vice-President) as well as returning members Kim Boyer (Treasurer), Denis Laurendeau (Secretary), and Karl Tombre (Past President) look forward working with the IAPR community for the next two years.