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