Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition
by Pavel Pudil and Michal Haindl
The ERCIM-sponsored STIPR'97 workshop jointly organized by the ERCIM institute CRCIM - UTIA, the International Association for Pattern Recognition Technical Committee 1 on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition and the Czech Pattern Recognition Society was held in Prague 9-11 June 1997.The meeting aimed to start a series of workshops in this 'classical' area in which a recent revival of interest has been noticed not only from researchers in other branches of pattern recognition community but also from other disciplines of mathematics and informatics.
STIPR'97 was attended by 35 participants from fifteen countries, six participants came from outside of Europe. Three invited lectures, one for each morning, were given by outstanding experts Prof. Josef Kittler (University of Surrey, U.K.), Dr Robert P.W.Duin (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands), and Dr André Gagalowicz (INRIA, France). Thirty technical papers presented orally were grouped into four thematic blocks:
- Feature Selection and Extraction
- Classification Methods
- Neural Nets and Fuzzy Approaches
- Applications.
Beside the plenary sessions with podium presentations there was a poster session organized.
The STIPR programme committee awarded a prize to the best student's paper. This was awarded to Van Mo Dang (University of Technology, Compiègne, France) for the paper Fuzzy Clustering of Spatial Binary Data by Van Mo Dang and Gerard Govaert. The prize for the best poster from the Czech Pattern Recognition Society was awarded to Gabi Peters and Norbert Krüger (Ruhr University of Bochum) for their paper Learning Object Representations by Clustering Banana Wavelet Responses.
Selected papers will also be printed in the special June 98 issue of the scientific journal Kybernetika.
According to the opinion of many participants from abroad the presented papers were of very high quality. Lively discussions outside the sessions helped to stimulate new promising collaborations of researchers from various countries.
No less successful appears to have been the social programme. Its highlight was represented by a sightseeing tour through Prague in a historical tram followed by a guided walking tour through the oldest parts of the city. The thirsty participants finished the second day of the workshop in the romanesque Royal Banquet Hall.
Our main objective was achieved - the community of researchers working in various aspects of statistical pattern recognition has been strengthened and new important scientific links have been created. We are already preparing papers for the STIPR'98 which will take place in Sydney, Australia 11-13 August 1998.
Please contact:
Pavel Pudil - CRCIM
Tel: +420 2 66052353
E-mail: pudil@utia.cas.cz