Dear Everybody,

And when you thought it was safe to forget all about Vienna and 13th ICPR, you got this issue and it brought it all back! This newsletter is dominated by the activities in Vienna and it comes to you hot from the press! In fact it is so hot, that some cookies did not manage to get into the oven before the door shut! So, the report on the technical content of ICPR as well as the New President's address will be included in the January issue of the newsletter. I can of course report that from August 22 this year our Big Boss is Professor Haralick, elected as president by the Governing Board in Vienna. Apart from this change, our Executive Committee has a new 1st Vice President, Professor Gelsema, a new 2nd Vice President, Professor Kidode, while the Treasurer remains the same, Dr Bigun, and the secretary, Dr Sanniti di Baja is also the same and of course Professor Kittler remains on the Committee as the past President. The other exciting news that came out of the GB meeting, was that ICPR 2000 will be in Barcelona, Spain.

There is one thing that makes ICPR different from other prestigious conferences: Its size and diversity. This is something that I hope it will be preserved in the future. There were four parallel tracks and 908 registered participants! We have far too many narrow specialised conferences where people go to hear themselves talking. It is good to be in a conference where one morning you hear about Image Processing and in the afternoon on Neural Networks and the next day on Computer Vision while you had been strongly tempted by the session on clustering.

So, ICPR has grown to record numbers, but its origins were humble: A 52-participants Workshop organised in Puerto Rico, exactly 30 years ago. To celebrate this anniversary, the organisers of 13th ICPR included a special commemorative session that took place during the banquet of the Conference: Three prominent members of the community took part in it, all three past recipients of the prestigious King Sun Fu award: Professors Freeman, Kanal and Rosenfeld. The session was "chaired" by Professor Ahuja. Each participant told us of his recollections of that first gathering. From what I heard, the most consice description of the "then and now" was given by Professor Rosenfeld: "The more it changes, the more it is the same thing!" Let us hope that that is going to be the case in Brisbane in 1998, in Barcelona in 2000, in Anytown in Anytime.

Maria Petrou