TC3 - IAPR

Planned Activities

9/2002 – 8/2004

 

 

 

 

 

Marco Gori

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione

Università di Siena (Italy)

 

 

 

 

1.      Scope

 

The scope of the Technical Committee 3 is mainly related to the use of  artificial neural networks (ANN) in the field of pattern recognition (PR). Two of the main objectives are the reduction of the gap between the PR and ANNs communities, as well as an attempt to identify potentialities of ANNs in the PR domain. In the last few years several models (including algorithms for processing graphs and trees) have been proposed which are likely to be very useful for pattern recognition. The current scope of TC3 includes not only neural networks, but also what is presently called Computational Intelligence, including fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing like genetic algorithms, and those branches of statistics that are relevant to the above fields.  A very important objective of the committee is also to provide a careful evaluation of the results of the research by encouraging people to compete on appropriate contests.

 

In the last two years TC3 has provided a technical cooperation with the following conferences and special sessions, which are related to its activities:

·        Neural Networks for Instrumentation, Measurement, and Related Industrial Applications, NATO-ASI  9-20 October 2001, Crema , Italy.

·        VI Ibero-American Symposium on Pattern Recognition SIARP'2001. October 12 - 14, 2001, Florianopolis – Brazil

·        Limitations and Future Trends in Neural Computation, Siena, 22-24 October 2001

·        Computational Intelligence in Financial Engineering - World Congress on Computational Intelligence, May 12-17, 2002. Honolulu - Hawaii.

 

 

2.      Plans for next two years

 

2.1  Organization of the first TC3 workshop.

We are planning to have this workshop next year, tentatively in conjunction with ICDAR2003. The workshop will be organized in Florence (see enclosed preliminary call for papers). The official call for papers will be announced by September 30, 2002.

 

2.2 Organization of contests.

We are planning to include a contest within the First Workshop of TC3 on graphical item recognition using neural networks and related approaches. The idea of organizing a contest, however, is not restricted to the scope of the workshop, but is to propose contests aimed at comparing in a systematic way novel approaches which appear in the literature. In particular this will create the typical pattern of a TC3 Workshop: In addition to typical submission, one is asked to competed on data which are given by the organizers of the workshop. In so doing we rely on the principle that it is very hard to "bless" a given contest, but every year new contests will be established so as not to bias the contest to specific approaches. The contest created within the TC3 might be partially or totally acquired by other IAPR technical committes. This activity is considered of crucial importance since it might open fruitful interactions with other technical committees on the actual role of neural networks models in pattern recognition.

 

2.2  Electronic News Letter.

The news letter will be published every four months (February 28, June 30, October 30).

The first edition of  will be published at the end of October 2003.

 

 

 

2.3 Updating of mailing lists.

Mailing-lists of researchers in the fields of Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence in Financial Engineering. have been prepared which come from an opportune filtering of the lists of international conferences like IJCNN2000. New items will be added taking into account lists of participants of recent conferences like ICPR 2002.

According to the decisions made by IAPR, the integration of mailing lists with those maintained at the main web site will be considered.

 

2.4 Updating of the web site.

The Web site of the technical committee has been recently renewed (www.dii.unisi.it/TC3). The site describes the aim of TC3, the events for which there is a technical cooperation, and collects a number of useful references for standard dataset typically used especially in the community of neural networks. 

The web site will be properly enriched and updated so as to include the news letters, the link to the TC3 Workshop, to information on the contests and, generally, all the information which are likely to be useful for the members of the community. In particular, pointers to public domain software for using ANNs will be added, as well as a large bibliographic reference on papers related to PR applications using ANNs.

 

2.5 Call for membership.

In order to enlarge the audience of TC3, a “call for membership” will be posted to the mailing list addresses. In addition announcements will be made in appropriate places, including a presentation of TC3 and of its workshop in IAPR’s Newsletters.

 

3.      Chairing for next two years

 

Professor Marco Gori proposes the plan for the next  two years and recommends  Dr. Simone Marinai  (University of Florence) as a co-chair. He is expected to support to the organization of the mentioned activities, with special emphasis on  the TC3 workshop and the newsletter.

 

 

4.      Biosketches

           

Prof. Marco Gori

 

Marco Gori received  the Laurea in electronic engineering from Università di Firenze, Italy, in 1984, and the Ph.D. degree in 1990 from Università di Bologna, Italy. From October 1988 to June 1989 he was a visiting student at the School of Computer Science (McGill University, Montreal).

In 1992, he became an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Università di Firenze and, in November 1995, he joint the Università di Siena, where he is currently full professor.

His main research interests are in neural networks, pattern recognition, and applications of machine learning to information retrieval on the Internet. He has leaded a number of research projects on these themes with either national or international partners, and has been involved in the organization of many scientific events, including the IEEE-INNS International Joint Conference on

Neural Networks, for which he acted as the program chair. (July 24-28, 2000),

 

Dr. Gori serves (served) an Associate Editor of a number of technical journals related to his areas of expertise, including Pattern Recognition, the IEEE Trans. Neural Networks, Neurocomputing, Neural Computing Survey, Pattern Analysis and Application, the International Journal on Computer Research, and the International Journal on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence.

He is the Italian chairman of the IEEE Neural Network Council (R.I.G.), is acting as the co-chair of the TC3 technical committee of the IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) on Neural Networks, and is the President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Gori is a fellow of the IEEE.

 

Contact informations:

 

Marco Gori

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione

Università di Siena

Via Roma, 56 - 53100 Siena (Italy)

Voice: +39 0557 26.36.10; Fax: +39 0577 26.36.02

Email: marco@ing.unisi.it

 

 

Dr. Simone Marinai

 

Simone Marinai received the Laurea in Electronic Engineering in 1992, from Università di Firenze, Italy. He obtained the PhD degree in computer science in 1996 with a thesis on the extraction of information from structured documents. In 1995 he has been a visiting scientist at Cenparmi lab (Concordia University - Montreal Canada). His main research interests are in pattern recognition, neural networks, and document processing applications. Currently he is Assistant Professor at Università di Firenze, where he teaches, among the others, neural networks applications in the field of document image analysis in the Artificial Intelligence course. In 2001 he was co-author (with Marco Gori) of the tutorial `` Artificial Neural Networks for Document Analysis and Recognition'', that was organized in conjunction with the ICADR 2001. The same tutorial has been organized in conjunction with ICPR 2002. Simone Marinai was the chairman of the workshop `` Document Analysis and Understanding for Document Databases'' (DAUDD) held in 1999 in conjunction with the DEXA conference. He is member of several conference program committees, and he is currently Associate Editor of the `` Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis'' journal.

 

Contact informations:

 

Simone Marinai

Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica

Università di Firenze

Via S. Marta, 3 - 50139 Firenze (Italy)

Voice: +39 055 47.96.361 Fax: +39 055 47.96.363

Email: simone@dsi.unifi.it