Dear Everybody,

I think it was Aristotle who said "We are what we repeatedly do. Thus excellence is not a quality but a habit". When I first read this, I was struck by the first part of it: We are what we do. We all, directly or indirectly are involved in creating the super-humanoid robots of the future: They will not only do the housework for us, not only do the mining, the fighting and the repairing of nuclear reactors; they will also catch us when we exceed the speed limit by a couple of miles, evade tax by a few pounds, pick a flower from a bush that is not ours, behave improperly in the streets, in the roads, in the buildings. Do you get a feeling of the Big Brother watching? I do. However, in order for this to come true, somebody will have to decide, authorise, have built and install all these robots everywhere. Somebody who will be the product of our society. One of us! Somebody who will have become near robot himself' in his thinking... I read with dismay the proposals for the "Virtual Conferences" (see p8). They are the answer to those appallingly organised conferences I felt again compelled, as an editor, to include a report on (see p7) as a way of increasing the voice of the helpless academic victim. The Virtual Conferences, however, will be perfectly organised. The Virtual Conferences will be cheap and effective ways of communication. In a Virtual Conference nobody will be delayed for hours in a cold airport and nobody will lose his suitcase. In a Virtual Conference nobody will be over-charged and nobody will be mugged by a local thug. In a Virtual Conference nobody will suffer indigestion from the local food and nobody will break his leg dancing the local dance during the banquet. But in a Virtual Conference nobody will dance a local dance, savour a local dish and stroll in unknown streets; because everybody will be sitting inside their four walls, in front of their screens being terribly efficient, terribly professional, terribly productive and terribly robot-like! I sincerely hope that my professional career will be over by the time ICPR will be called IVCPR! What about then all the frustrations we all suffer sometimes at conferences? Wasn't it Nevatia who said that what characterises the human vision system is that it can come up with answers like "This is a red cow with five legs", implying that the human brain, the human nature, can identify the useful, the pleasant and the desirable in a clutter of junk, unpleasantness and repulsion? And isn't that what makes a human different from a robot? And isn't that what makes possible for even a badly organised bad conference to be preferable to a perfectly organised Virtual one?

Maria Petrou