The First International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (PReMI’05) was organized by the Machine Intelligence Unit (MIU), Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, and was attended by about 100 participants from various parts of the world including USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Poland, Germany, Italy, Israel, Turkey and India. The participants were mostly university/institution faculty, research scholars, and personnel from R&D organizations. The event had a two-day pre-conference tutorial, an inaugural session, keynote, evening and invited lectures, contributory paper/poster presentations, and a valedictory session.

 

The inaugural session was chaired by Prof. Sankar K. Pal, Director of the Indian Statistical Institute and General Chair of the conference, who welcomed the delegates. He also gave an introduction and objective of the conference. The Hon’ble Chief Minister of the Government of West Bengal, Mr. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, inaugurated the conference. Prof. Andrzej Skowron, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland, was the Chief Guest, and Prof. Sanjit K. Mitra, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA was the Guest of Honor of the function. During the session, Mr. Bhattacharjee told about the IT policies of the Government of West Bengal. This was followed by the speeches of Prof. Malay K. Kundu, Prof.-in-Charge, CCSD, ISI and Industrial Liason of PReMI’05, Prof. Skowron, Prof. Sanjit Mitra, and Prof. Sushmita Mitra, Program Chair of PReMI’05. The session was ended with the Vote of Thanks by Prof. C. A. Murthy, Head, MIU of ISI and Organizing Chair of PReMI’05.

 

The objective of this international conference was to present state-of-the-art scientific results, encourage academic and industrial interaction, and promote collaborative research and developmental activities in pattern recognition, machine intelligence and related fields, involving scientists, engineers, professionals, researchers and students from India and abroad. The conference will be held every two years to make it an ideal platform for people to share their views and experiences in the said areas. Particular emphasis was placed on computational biology, data mining and knowledge discovery, soft computing, case based reasoning, biometry, apart from dealing with various pattern recognition/image processing problems.  Tutorial, keynote, evening and invited speeches were delivered by scientists of international repute from both academia and industry. Technical sessions encompassed all these emergent areas. The conference gave a platform for young researchers to review the state-of-the-art, to present their research outputs, to interact and establish contacts with well-known senior researchers of the field.

 

The first two days were scheduled for tutorial presentations, and four tutorial lectures were delivered by four renowned speakers, namely, Prof. A. K. Jain(Michigan State University, USA), Prof. R. Chellappa (University of Maryland, USA), Prof. J. K. Udupa (University of Pennsylvania, USA), and Dr. S. C. K. Shiu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong) before an audience of about 75 participants. There were various keynote, evening and invited speeches delivered by Prof. A. K. Jain, Prof. R. Chellappa, Dr. D. W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory, USA, Prof. A. Skowron, Prof. M. Zhang, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA, Prof. J. K. Aggarwal, University  of Texas at Austin, USA, Prof. J. K. Udupa, Dr. A. Buller, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Japan, Prof. B. Bhattacharya, Simon Fraser University, Canada, Prof. B. Lovell, the University of Queensland St Lucia, Australia, Prof. M. Gokmen, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, Dr. M.  Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, Prof. U. B. Desai, IIT Bombay, India, Dr. L. Bruzzone,  University of Trento, Italy and Prof. V. Di Gesu', University of Palermo, Italy.

 

More than 250 research papers were received for the conference. After the review process, about 120 papers were accepted for oral/poster presentation and publication in the conference proceedings which was published as Volume 3776 of the prestigious Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series by Springer Verlag.  Among these 120 papers, about 100 papers were accepted for oral presentation and the rest for poster presentation. About 130 researchers from 20 countries registered for the conference, including 50 from outside India.

 

In order to encourage young researchers of India, about 35 participants were provided with fellowships covering the expenses towards a few or all items like registration fees of the conference and the tutorial, travel and local hospitality. The feedback as given by the participants during the valedictory session on December 22, 2005 was overwhelming. During the Valedictory session, where the key note speakers Prof. M. Zhang, Prof. A. Skowron and Dr. D. W. Aha were present, it was declared that the Second International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (PReMI’07) will be held in Kolkata, India, during December 18-22, 2007, and will be organized by the Machine Intelligence Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India.

 

The conference was funded by the Indian Statistical Institute, Center for Soft Computing Research of Indian Statistical Institute, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India. The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), CIMPA (France), Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), IEEE, and Webel, Government of West Bengal IT Company also co-sponsored the event.

Conference Report:  PReMI 2005

Return to Home Page