Fu Lecture Series

As initially announced in the IAPR Newsletter of April 2012, the University of Notre Dame hosted a series of lectures during the Fall Semester 2012, given by recipients of the K. S. Fu Prize.

The lecture series started on September 10, 2012 with Prof. Theo Pavlidis, Distinguished Prof. Emeritus at the University of Stony Brooks, who gave a talk on Using Domain Knowledge for Low Level Vision. Based on his long experience in both academia and industry, one of the main messages given by Theo in his talk was that computer vision is an extremely hard task that can be solved only if we include all available prior information about the scenes we want to interpret.

The lecture series was continued with Prof. J. K. Aggarwal, Cullen Trust Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who talked on Recognition of Facial Expressions for Improving Communications Skills of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Jake explained how the latest research results in facial expression recognition and tracking can be utilized in an interactive game to improve emotion recognition capabilities of children with autism spectrum disorders.

The third lecture in the series was given by Prof. Thomas S. Huang, William Everitt Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The lecture was entitled Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction and addressed a diversity of problems that need to be solved when developing novel human-computer interfaces. It was accompanied by live demonstrations given by Prof. Huang’s PhD students Vuong Le and Zhen Li.

Next was the lecture Detecting and Distinguishing Nuances of Anomaly in Machine Perception Systems by Prof. Josef Kittler, Distinguished Professor at the University of Surrey, UK. Demonstrated mainly on the example of automatic sports video annotation and understanding, Josef showed ways to integrate methods of different nature so as to detect various nuances of anomalies in the input data of a complex pattern recognition and interpretation system.

The fifth lecture was given by Prof. Anil Jain, Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. Anil talked on Large-Scale Data Clustering. He first gave a general introduction and an overview of the field of clustering and then discussed novel algorithms that are able to handle large data sets, comprising hundreds of millions of objects.

Finally, Prof. Horst Bunke, Prof. Emeritus at the University of Bern and Melchor Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, presented a lecture on Bridging the Gap between Structural and Statistical Pattern Recognition. This lecture gave a review of graph kernels and graph embedding methodology, which allow one to apply the whole arsenal of tools from statistical pattern recognition to symbolic data structures, and showed examples of successful applications of these concepts.

The lectures were well attended by students and faculty members of the University of Notre Dame. In addition they were broadcast live. Video streams and all slides accompanying the lecture have been archived and can be accessed via www.cse.nd.edu/Fu_Prize_Seminars/

When the planning of the lecture series was started, the most recent winner of the K. S. Fu Prize was not yet announced. Meanwhile, the K. S. Fu Prize 2012 has been awarded to Prof. Rama Chellappa, Minta Martin Professor of Engineering and Director of the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland (see related article in this issue). We are glad to announce that Rama has been invited to continue this lecture series and has agreed to present his lecture in Spring 2013. Details about time and location of his talk will be announced in due time at the seminar series’ web site.

Finally, we want to thank all speakers for accepting our invitation and making this lecture series a great success. Further thanks are due to the IAPR for announcing the lecture series on their web page and to the University of Notre Dame for financial support and for providing the technical infrastructure .