News

Dear IAPR Community Members,

Please take a few minutes to respond to the IAPR Spring 2021 Survey (https://tinyurl.com/iaprsurvey2021), an anonymous, short, online form focusing on your opinions and attitudes in the face of the pandemic and our recovery from it as an international research community.

Together we can make your IAPR even better.

Many thanks,

The IAPR 2020-2022 ExCo

Dan Lopresti, Lale Akarun, Terence Sim, Arjan Kuijper, Bob Fisher, and Apostolos Antonacopoulos

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Herb Freeman, a pioneer in our field and one of the founders of the IAPR more than 40 years ago.  The ExCo expresses our deepest condolences to Herb’s family, friends, and colleagues on behalf of the entire IAPR community.

Herb had a long and productive career that touched many, many people. He worked on the development of the first electronic computers in the early days of computing, and helped initiate computing engineering as a discipline at three major U.S. universities.  He published over 100 papers, authored a number of books, and helped to establish important journals. He was one of the select group of founders who organized the first “ICPR” in 1973, which marked the start of his leadership service that culminated in his role in the formal founding of IAPR in 1978.  Over the years Herb served as a Vice President, Treasurer, and ultimately President of the IAPR.  He was awarded the K.S. Fu Prize in 1994.

Herb’s numerous important contributions in the early days of our field place him in very rare company; he will be missed. I encourage you to read the personal remembrances of Herb in the January 2021 Special Issue of the IAPR Newsletter.

With deep sympathy,

Dan Lopresti, IAPR President

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the 2020 J.K. Aggarwal Prize is Professor Abhinav Gupta, Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,PA, USA.

The citation for the prize is:
“For pioneering contributions to unsupervised and self-supervised
learning in computer vision and robotics.”

The prize will be presented to Professor Gupta prior to his award lecture at ICPR2020 Virtual-Milano, 4 p.m. (CET) on January 12, 2021.

Congratulations to Professor Gupta on this achievement.

Apostolos Antonacopoulos

IAPR President

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the 2020 King-Sun Fu Prize is Professor Ching Yee Suen, Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (CENPARMI), Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The citation for the prize is:
“For pioneering research and exceptional contributions to handwriting recognition and document understanding in theory, practice, and education.”

The prize will be presented to Professor Suen prior to his award lecture at ICPR2020 Virtual-Milano, 1 p.m. (CET) on January 12, 2021.

Congratulations to Professor Suen on this achievement.

Apostolos Antonacopoulos

IAPR President

It is our pleasure to announce that the recipient of the 2020 Maria Petrou Prize is Professor Maja Pantic, Professor of Affective and Behavioral Computing, Imperial College, London, UK, and AI Scientific Research Lead at Facebook London.

The citation for the prize is:
“For contributions to artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in computer vision and machine learning applied to automatic analysis of human faces, machine understanding of human behaviour, and multimodal recognition of human emotions.”

The prize will be presented to Professor Pantic prior to her award lecture at ICPR2020 Virtual-Milano, 1 p.m. (CET) on January 13, 2021.

Congratulations to Professor Pantic on this achievement.

Apostolos Antonacopoulos

IAPR President