IM2 and Affective Sciences NCCRs Summer Institute 2008

IM2 and Affective Sciences Summer Institute took place in Riederalp from 1-3 September 2008. IM2 is a Swiss National Center of Competence on Research in the field of Interactive Multimodal Information Management. I have been the deputy director of IM2 since 2006. Affective Sciences is another Swiss National Center of Competence on Reseach interested in understanding how emotions affect the way individuals and societies behave. Riederalp is a village in Valais Canton of Switzerland not very far from the world famous Aletsch glacier. This summer institute was organized to explore common interests between these two NCCRs and to set the ground for stronger collaborations between groups and individuals involved in each. To do so, after a short presentation of each NCCR, a GEKO (Get to Know each Other) session was organized followed by parallel sessions with presentations and workshops around themes of common interest. Finally a poster session was an opportunity for many of the researchers to present their research activities in more details. I acted at the moderator of the GEKO, and three of my research team members attended this summer institute (Francesca de Simone, Jong-Seok Lee, and Ashkan Yazdani). The program of the summer institute, and the slides of the presentations are accessible from the following url:

http://www.im2.ch/summer-institute-2008

In the above site you will also find a lot of pictures. But I also took some of mine, that can be seen at the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/IM2AffectiveScienceSummerInstitute2008#

SPIE Optics and Photonics 2008

The annual SPIE meeting Optics and Photonics took place from 10-14 August 2008 in San Diego. Optics and Photonics is a huge symposium composed of several conferences. The conference Appications of Digital Image Processing is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) conferences in image processing. It has been founded and is chaired by Andy Tescher a well-known researcher in the field. This year, Andy asked me to be the acting chair of the conference due to some other committments he had. The conference was very intresting with a lot of first time presentations in some of the most recent advances in image processing. Among others I would like to mention JPEG-XR which is a new standard for image compression. I took a few pictures during the conference that can be consulted from the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SPIEOpticsAndPhotonics2008#

The link to Optics and Photonics 2008 program is somehow unavailable at the time of the writing of this article. But the best way to find out about the program would be to go to SPIE website at http://www.spie.org and then look for past conferences. I may update this article with the exact url, if SPIE updates its website at some point in future.