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Special Edition of Pattern Recognition Letters: Celebrating the life and work of Maria Petrou

Maria Petrou was an outstanding scientist with a well developed sense of humour, and seemingly tireless energy. She had the ability to enliven whatever she became involved in. Although she worked for most of her professional life in the UK, she was born and died in Thessaloniki, and was proud of her Greek roots and the language, culture and intellectual traditions of her country of birth. She trained as an astronomer, but moved into the fields of pattern recognition and image analysis. She took a leading role in the IAPR, and made many innovative research contributions, some of which are set to have a lasting impact. She was a woman and devoted mother, who worked in fields where women are in a minority and has provided a role model for younger women scientists and engineers to follow. Those who came into contact with her were invariably impressed both by her incisive thinking and warm personality. She enriched the scientific lives of over 50 PhD students and numerous collaborators from all over the world. Sadly, she passed away on October 15 2012 after a brave battle with cancer, and will be greatly missed.

The aim of this special edition of Pattern Recognition Letters is to celebrate Maria’s life and work. The aim is to collect together both scientific articles and personal reflections which illuminate her contributions to our field. We encourage contributions from both those who worked with Maria, and those whose work was influenced by her.

Maria’s interests were broad, spanning image processing and analysis, remote sensing, medical image analysis, computer vision and, of course, pattern recognition. She was noted for her key contributions the trace transform, mixed pixel classification (remote sensing community), Hough, contextual classification (multi resolution MRF), and edge/line detection.

We invite three different types of contribution:

a) Short recollections of Maria and reflections on her life and work, that capture her personality and interests. We are particularly keen to receive photographs to illustrate these accounts. We would hope to edit both the photographs and accounts together into a montage capturing the different facets of her life and work.

b) Reviews that place her work in the context of the literature in the field, focus on her scientific contributions and assess their lasting influence.

c) Original scientific papers in the broad areas of Maria’s research interests, pointing out their relevance to her work. These could be posthumous papers with Maria as co-author, submitted by one of her collaborators or students.

Although we want the special edition to reflect Maria’s life and personal qualities, we expect that the bulk of papers in the Special Edition will be original scientific articles focused around her research interests.

Deadlines:

submission of papers for review – 1st June 2013
(submission open on http://ees.elsevier.com/prletters/ from 1st May 2013).
first reviews/decisions – 15th August 2013
revised papers – 1st October 2013
publication – 1st January 2014.

Josef Kittler
Edwin Hancock
Guest Editors.

The IAPR Governing Board (GB), at its biennial meeting during ICPR 2012, examined and discussed three high-quality proposals for hosting ICPR 2016.

The result of the GB vote was that Cancun, Mexico will be the location of ICPR in four years’ time (following ICPR 2014 in Stockholm, Sweden).

IAPR Executive Committee for 2012-2014

The 2010-2012 term of the IAPR Executive Committee (ExCo) as well as that of the standing committees and of the leadership of technical committees (TCs) ended with the biennial Governing Board (GB) meeting during ICPR2012 in Tsukuba, Japan.

The IAPR GB elected new ExCo officers for the 2012-2014 term who have now taken office and started work on the association’s plans for the new term. One of the ExCo’s very first tasks is the appointment of standing committees and TC Chairs.

The 2012-2014 ExCo members elected are as follows:

President: Kim Boyer (USA)
Vice President (1st): Tieniu Tan (China)
Vice President (2nd): Apostolos Antonacopoulos (UK)
Secretary: Ingela Nystrom (Sweden)
Treasurer: Aytul Ercil (Turkey)

Denis Laurendeau (Canada), the 2010-2012 President, assumes the ex officio post of Past President, completing the ExCo.

It is with great sadness that the Executive Committee has been informed that Professor Maria Petrou passed away on October 15, 2012. Her funeral will be at 17:00 (local time) on October 16, 2012 in Kalamaria Thessaloniki.

After a distinguished career at University of Surrey, she joined the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College in London UK in 2005. In 2009, she became the Director of the Informatics and Telematics Institute of CERTH in Thessaloniki Greece while retaining as part time her chair at Imperial College. In addition of being a distinguished researcher, Professor Petrou was also known as a very active member of the IAPR Community. She held many positions in the IAPR including Editor of the Newsletter, Treasurer of the Executive Committee and member of standing and technical committees.

Professor Petrou will be remembered as someone who was hardworking, dedicated to research and student training and, for those who worked with her closely, was also a person with a very special sense of humor. Professor Petrou will be sadly missed.

An obituary for Professor Petrou appeared in the United Kingdom in The Telegraph.

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the J. K. Aggarwal Prize 2012 is Professor Rene Vidal, Johns Hopkins University, USA.

The citation for the prize is:

“For outstanding contributions to the generalized principal component analysis (GPCA) and subspace clustering in computer vision and pattern recognition.”

Professor Vidal will receive his prize at the ICPR 2012 that will take place in Tsukuba on November 11-15, 2012. The J. K. Aggarwal ceremony and lecture will be presented during the ICPR 2012.

Congratulations to Professor Vidal on this achievement.

Ingela Nyström

IAPR Secretary

Don’t miss the University of Notre Dame Distinguished Lecture Series by K.S. Fu Prize Winners.

http://www.cse.nd.edu/Fu_Prize_Seminars/