Dear All,

  This is the last issue of the newsletter I am producing and editing. Having done this job for 5 years now, I thought the time came f'or some new blood to come into IAPR and somebody else to have this great opportunity.

 Over the years, I had a lot of fun writing to you and I made lots and lots of` friends, and a few (very few I would like to believe) enemies. Sometimes I had feedback verbally or in writing and very often I was astonished by what people read in my writings: often the interpretation used was heavily model-based! I would like to take this last opportunity as editor, to explain just a little what I was writing about. I guess I cheated IAPR, as the message I was trying to pass over the years had nothing to do with Pattern Recognition or Image Processing; it was all about how seriously we take ourselves. We are 4-dimensional creations in spacetime. Early in my life I came face to face with death: this gave me a scale of measuring our "size" in time. Then I studied Astronomy, and this gave me a scale of our span in space. We are, I am, so insignificant in spacetime! How can we possibly take ourselves so seriously? Dear friends, I will miss communicating with you!

 

Maria Petrou

 PS The melodrama over, you can turn the page now to see the jokes!