MCS 2010 is the ninth workshop in a well-established series of meetings providing an international forum for the discussion of issues in multiple classifier system design. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from diverse communities concerned with this topic, including neural networks, pattern recognition, machine learning, and statistics. A special focus of MCS 2010 was the application of multiple classifier systems in data mining, medical imaging, and bioinformatics.

MCS 2010 was endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)  and sponsored by the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA),  the Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo (CMIC).

MCS 2010 was at held at the at the Smart Village Club close to the Nile University Smart Village Campus at the Smart Village; which is a unique IT industry environment with excellent conference facilities and an exquisite landscape.

From more than 50 submissions, the program committee selected 31 high quality papers to create an interesting scientific program. Papers were organized into sessions dealing with classifier combination and classifier selection, diversity, bagging and boosting, combination of multiple kernels, and applications. During the three days of the workshop, the attendees presented their papers, and the presentations were followed by vivid discussions that were continued during coffee and lunch breaks. Top researchers of the field participated in the workshop and added great contributions to the event. Many graduate students also attended the workshop and the audience ranged from different parts of the world like Canada, China, Germany, Spain, France, Switzerland, UK, USA, Iceland, Russia, Netherlands, Italy, and of course Egypt.

The scientific program was enriched with two very interesting invited talks. The invited talk by Gavin Brown (University of Manchester, UK)  entitled “Some Thoughts at the Interface of Ensemble Methods and Feature Selection” presented the view of importing/exporting ideas from the fields of “Multiple classifier Systems” and “feature selection”.

The second invited talk was given by Friedhelm Schwenker (Ulm, Germany) on the topic :”Multiple classifier systems for the recognition of human emotions”. The presentation provided an overview on recent developments in multimodal pattern recognition of emotions in Human Computer Interaction, MCS for facial expression recognition, and Audio-visual laughter detection using ensemble methods. 

The workshop was closed with a panel session organized and moderated by Prof. Fabio Roli, on the following subject “Back to the past: a speech from 2010 at MCS 2000”. In this session panellists were asked to “magically fly back” to the past, from MCS 2010 in Cairo to MCS 2000 in Cagliari and report on what their message would be to MCS 2000 participants, if they would give a keynote speech from 2010?

Conference Report: MCS 2010

Report prepared by Neamat El Gayar (Egypt)

Conference Co-Chairs:

 

Neamat El Gayar (Egypt)

Josef Kittler, IAPR Fellow (UK)

Fabio Roli, IAPR Fellow (Italy)

Proceedings of the conference have been published by

Springer

in the series

Lecture Notes in

Computer Science

(Volume 5997)

 

Click on the image to go to the publisher’s web site for this volume.

The panellists—Horst Bunke, Bob Duin, Lucy Kuncheva, Terry Windeatt and Zhi-Hua Zhou—gave very interesting and inspiring presentations summarizing progress and research developments of the field in the last 10 years and also presenting recommendations and promising future directions.

A rich social program was also a main focal point of the workshop. A welcome reception was organized on the first afternoon at the new Campus at the Nile University where participants were greated by the Nile University president. The banquet was held in the second evening at an oriental restaurant at the Al-Azhar Park located in one of Cairo’s most authentic parts overlooking main monuments of the old Cairo quarter. After the scientific program of the third day participants joined an excursion to the Great Pyramids of Giza and to the Sphinx followed by attending the famous Light-Sound show at the Giza Plataux area.

Dr. Terek Khalil, President of the Nile University, (far left)welcomes MCS 2010 participants (from left:  Josef Kittler, Lucy Kuncheva, Neamat El-Gayar, and Fabio Roli) at a reception at Nile University Campus.