IAPR Pattern Recognition Resources web site

"We have recently completed the first round of development on the IAPR Pattern Recognition Education Resources web site:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/IAPR/

This work was initiated by the Internation Association for Pattern Recognition (http://www.iapr.org/).
The goal was a web site that can support students, researchers and staff.
Of course, advances in pattern recognition and its subfields means that developing the site will be a never-ending process. However, we believe that the current site is
now well developed enough for general use.
What resources does the IAPR

Education web site have?
================

The most important resources are for students, researchers and educators. These include lists with URLs to:

- Tutorials and surveys
- Explanatory text
- Online demos
- Datasets
- Book lists
- Free code
- Course notes
- Lecture slides
- Course reading lists
- Coursework/homework
- A list of course web pages at many universities

There are many areas for extension in the web pages, but they already link to more than 3000 resources.

These resources are subdivided into five areas. Of course, the boundaries are never distinct and we undoubtedly will also provoke a few dissenting opinions. However, we have tried to address the main work done by the IAPR community, as clustered into 3 core technology areas and 2 broad families of application areas:

1. Symbolic Pattern Recognition
2. Statistical Pattern Recognition
3. Machine Learning
4. 1D Signal Analysis
5. Computer vision/Image Processing/Machine Vision

Acknowledgements
================

Initial website development was by Christos Papadopoulos and Apostolos Antonacopoulos. Content entry was Edinburgh University PhD students Kisuh Ahn, Edwin Bonilla, Lei Chen, Tim Hospedales, Gail Sinclair, and Narayanan Unny E, supervised by Bob Fisher. Content advice supplied by by the 2006-8 Education Committee: Bruce Maxwell, Sudeep Sarkar, Xiaoyi Jiang, Laurent Heutte and
Sergios Theodoridis. Funding was provided by the EC funded euCognition network, The British Machine Vision Association and the UK's EPSRC. "

Prof. Robert B. Fisher, School of Informatics, Univ. of Edinburgh

Next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery

In just a short while brand new beta versions of Windows Live Photo Gallery and the completely brand new Windows Live Movie Maker will be available for free at http://download.live.com! In addition to Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, this beta release includes significant updates to all of the Windows Live software applications for your Windows PC, including Messenger, Mail, Writer, Toolbar and Family Safety. You’ll find sweet new features across the products. If you want to hear more about what we’re delivering across Windows Live, check out this blog post from Chris Jones.
Here are some of cool things you can do with the new beta version of Photo Gallery:

People tagging: Photo Gallery automatically finds the people in your photos so you can add a name to the face. Then later, all you need to do is type in someone’s name to see all the photos of that person.
Photos from friends: See new photos from the people you know as soon as they post them online. Their new shots come to you automatically in Photo Gallery.
Photo editing: Adjust exposure, color, or detail by hand, or use auto adjust—either way, your photos look great. You can even create amazing panoramas—Photo Gallery automatically stitches them together for you.
More support for 3rd parties! We’ve heard tons of requests for more publishing options, so this release includes a new Publishing API that enables the community to build plug-ins for virtually any sharing service. A new resource for developers will be at http://dev.live.com/photogallery.

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Stanford Engineering Everywhere

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience. This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering. Stanford Engineering Everywhere offers: Anytime and anywhere access to complete lecture videos via streaming or downloaded media. Full course materials including syllabi, handouts, homework, and exams. Online social networking with fellow SEE students. Support for PCs, Macs and mobile computing devices. Stanford encourages fellow educators to use Stanford Engineering course materials in their own classrooms. A Creative Commons license allows for free and open use, reuse, adaptation and redistribution of Stanford Engineering Everywhere material.
http://see.stanford.edu/default.aspx

The First International Conference on Advances in Multimedia

The rapid growth of information on the Web, its ubiquity and pervasiveness makes the www the biggest repository. While the volume of information may be useful, it creates new challenges for information retrieval, identification, understanding, selection, etc. Investigating new forms of platforms, tools, principles offered by Semantic Web opens another door to enable humans programs, or agents to understand what records are about, and allows integration between domain-dependent and media-dependent knowledge. Multimedia information has always been part of the Semantic Web paradigm, but requires substantial effort to integrate both.
The new technological achievements in terms of speed and the quality of expanding and creating a vast variety of multimedia services like voice, email, short messages, Internet access, m-commerce, to mobile video conferencing, streaming video and audio.
Large and specialized databases together with these technological achievements have brought true mobile multimedia experiences to mobile customers. Multimedia imply adoption of new technologies and challenges to operators and infrastructure builders in terms of ensuring fast and reliable services for improving the quality of web information retrieval.
Huge amounts of multimedia data are increasingly available. The knowledge of spatial and/or temporal phenomena becomes critical for many applications, which requires techniques for the processing, analysis, search, mining, and management of multimedia data.
MMEDIA 2009 aims to provide an international forum by researchers, students, and professionals for presenting recent research results on advances in multimedia, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia and to bring together experts from both academia and industry for the exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges in multimedia fundamentals, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia, multimedia ontology, multimedia user-centered perception, multimedia services and applications, and mobile multimedia.

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Mpeg-7 Descriptors Are Available For Download

Download tha latest Version of MPEG-7 Descriptors for C#

The implementation of these descriptors is based on Lire image retrieval System (Lire). The source code is a modification of the implementation that can be found in the LIRE retrieval system. The original version of the descriptors' implementation is written in Java and is available online as open sourcei under the General Public License (GPL).

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Introducing Picasa 3.0 (and big changes for Picasa Web Albums)

A little over two years ago, we launched Picasa Web Albums to make publishing photos online easy. Now Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day. Each of these photos records a different moment, or a different perspective, but one thing they all have in common is that in each case, the person behind the camera wanted to share their experience with a friend, their extended family, or maybe the world.

Today, we're rolling out major technology upgrades to both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. As you might have guessed, these are largely focused on how we share and enjoy our photos with others.

For starters, there's a brand-new feature called "name tags" in Picasa Web Albums that helps you quickly label all the people in your photos, so you can organize and share your photos based on who's in the picture. Name tags uses advanced technology to automatically group similar faces together. That way, you can quickly label all the people you care about in your photo collection. Once you've labeled your photos, it's then a snap to do things like create a slideshow with every picture of you and your best friend, or easily share party photos with everybody who appears in that photo album.

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