Hello Everybody!

One of the greatest pleasures of our discipline is that we can see directly the fruits of our research being applied to real problems of everyday life. Coming from an astronomical background (nothing could be more distant than the Big Bang itself) I firmly believe that there is no fundamental research that is really useless or completely irrelevant to every day life. It is all a matter of time-scales! When Boolean Algebra was developed, computers did not exist and when Walsh developed the functions named after him, he was probably just playing mathematical games unaware of their future applications to image processing. And yet, although Big Bang is the furthest event we can think in this world, it is not a coincidence that it is the closest as well, since it happened at ALL points of space at the same time, ie. it happened here! So, there is a web of interconnections that things that seem irrelevant to everyday life now, may one day be very, very relevant. All I am saying is that we are lucky to work in a discipline that the time-scale between scribbling pages of Algebra on a piece of paper (or tippy-typing it on a computer screen) and the time we see the impact of these equations on every day life is not very large.

Why all this philosophical dribbling now? Because I just came back from an SPIE conference on Machine Vision Applications to Industry. I usually get fascinated at such conferences by the applications people think for their work. This time what got my fancy was an application to automate the "production line mail" - what you and I call "junk mail", ie those types of letters you receive some times, saying that you have "uniquely been chosen to receive the latest amazingly great offer of bla bla that does bla bla". Soon, I am pleased to announce, you will get even more of this stuff, as people develop systems that will automatically inspect the match between the address on the letter and the address on the envelop so that your letter is not put by a mistake into somebody else's envelope and you are left out of the "unique opportunity of the amazing offer" etc etc.

However, the record for an original application of the wider field of Artificial Intelligence, in my mind, is still held by a paper I read a few years back now in a journal: It was describing the development of an expert system to aid the decisions of aphorisms the Greek Orthodox church had to make! The expert system was meant to make such decisions more consistent. So, you see, even God started to enjoy the benefits of our research! Thus, keep up the good work; you never know where your next invitation to consultancy may come from!

Maria Petrou