IMDSP TC Minutes: ICIP 2001 Minutes 10-9-01 Thessaloniki, Greece Agenda 0) Roll 1) Announcements 2) ICIPs: Current and Proposals 4) IMDSP Election Nominations 5) ICASSP Paper review timetable ------------ 0) Attendence: Aizawa, Apostolopouos, Chou, Gray, Guillemot, Kalker, Maitre, Manjunath, Moulin, Ortega, Pappas, Pitas, Rabbani, Salembier, Torres, Zerubia Guests: Carlo Regazzoni, Francesco De Natale (ICIP 05) Professor Alex Kot, Professor Kai-Kuang Ma, Professor Tan Yo-Sung Ho Kwangju Inst. of Sci and Tech, Jong Beom Ra (Kaist) (ICIP07?) There are 30 "voting members" (" The IMDSP TC shall consist of 30 voting members plus the Chair, Vice Chair, and Past Chair." -bylaws) So a quorum is 15. ("one half the voting members") 1) Announcements -I will propose some minor revisions to the bylaws before I retire from TC Chair 1 January. Mostly cleaning up minor inconsistencies. -Included below is the hot topics list recently compiled for the visit of the IEEE president that was cancelled. 2) ICIPs ICIP 2001 Iannis and Costas gave a report. 1600 submissions, 820 papers, 6 plenary 86 participants in 5 tutorials (one cancelled tutorial and one short course) Costas: 866 paid registrations, 441 members 238 nonmemembers 56 student members 131 student nonmembers 149 backed out 717 registered participants banquet: 300 tickets + 28 students proceedings: 155 volumes, 285 ordered bookprogram of ieee 58 extra cds. 35 short course attendence List of participating countries in 2001 included below. Future ICIPs: 2002 Rochester no report 2003 Barcelona: Approval of the proposed topics for ICIP 2003 (Barcelona) in the call for papers Torres, Salembier, Ortega, Aizawa present All responding emails voted approval of the List of Topics for ICIP 2003 at http://gps-tsc.upc.es/imatge/_Philippe/CFP_2003.pdf. Approval confirmed Note from Josianne Z.: I looked at the CFP of ICIP03. everything is fine except the date of January 10th, 03 for the summary reception. I think it would be better to choose January 15th (at least for France!!!) bcse I know people taking New Year vacation till this date. 2005 Genoa Proposal Carlo & Francesco presented approved by TC 2004 Singapore Proposal: Kot, Ma, Tan Presented approved 2006 Recruiting proposals from NorthAmerica 2007 Interest from Seoul Korea (Professor Sang Uk Lee) Yo-Sung Ho Kwangju Inst. of Sci and Tech, Jong Beom Ra (Kaist) (ICIP07?) Note: Approval relayed to Board of Governors/Executive Committee Meeting by Gray who discussed disparture from usual North American alternation. Generally favorable response 3) Awards (Chou) Reported on nominations relayed to Mercer 4) IMDSP TC Elections. Elections: The annual election will be held in late November/Early December. Below a list of potential candidates which includes those nominated last year who did not win (and have not explicitly informed me that they did not wish to run again) together with recent additions by your nominations committee (Thrasos Pappas and I). Candidates need a formal nominator. Accept nominations through 31 November 2001. Email ballot will be held 3 December through 5PM 17 December. Retiring in 2002: Leahy Maitre Pappas (term extended due to VC position, but place to be filled) Reibman Yagle Many thanks to those retiring (we officially "retire" them at the next ICASSP). So there are 5 positions to fill. Note: It is the prerogative of the Chair and Vice Chair to remove a TC member at the end of the first half of their 6 year term if they have not materially contributed to fulfilling the responsibilities of the group. Such members can be nominated, but they do not "automatically" get elected to the second half of their term. No members were found to be in this category this year. Below is a list of 2000 candidates who were not elected and who have not informed me they do not wish to run: (Nominator's name in parentheses) 13 with nominators, plus 4 holdovers not yet renominated Yucel Altunbasak (Gray) Mita D. Desai (Pappas) Jean-Luc Dugelay (Gray) Joseph M. Francos (Zerubia) William Clem Karl (Konrad) Faouzi Kossentini Sang Uk Lee (Gray) Jin Li (Chou) Robert Nowak (Zerubia) Ashok C. "Kris" Popat (Gray) Yehoshua Y. Zeevi Are there renominators for any not yet formally renominated? All of those not elected should be considered as possible candidates if they are willing to run again. To be candidates they must be formally nominated by a TC member. In addition to the above pool there are recent nominees as listed next: Sheila Hemami (Reibman) Kai-Kuang Ma (Gray) Guido Schuster (Pappas) Ricardo Queiroz (Pappas) Candidate Biographies (except Schuster) are below. Fresh updated bios for renominated candidates would be welcome. Nomination committee's nomination for IMDSP TC Vice Chair for the term 1/2002-12/2003: Iannis Pitas Chair's nomination for IMDSP TC Chair: Thrasos Pappas Elected by acclimation at meeting. Will take office 1 January 2002. 5) Timetable of ICASSP 2002 Technical Program November 2 Assign papers to TC chairs November 9 Reviewers assigned by TC chairs December 10 Reviews finished in the website December 18 Acceptance/Rejection, preliminary program by TCs (website) January 7 Notification of paper acceptance January 15 Preliminary program sent to TC for approval January 30 Final (sessions) assigned February 1 Preliminary program on the web February 15 Initial Program February 25 Final Program to printers March 30 Back from printers April 15 Received by everyone (1 month before conference) ---------------------------------- Other business: Pappas pointed out the difficulty of constructing reliable list of active ICIP reviewers and suggested future ICIPs consider more of a tree structure with clusters being passed to TC members for futher assignment rather than TC chair trying to assign reviewers to all 1500 papers. ---------------------------------- 6) Hot Topics in Image/Video Processing suggested by IMDSP TC mamebers -image/video processing in human centered interfaces -multimedia intellectual property right protection -access control and biometrics -image/video indexing and retrieval (MPEG7 stuff) -blind deconvolution for remote sensing and medical imaging -data mining in large image data bases -Image and video indexing -Image understanding - Video coding through image understanding - 3-D image communication (stereoscopic and multiview) that will one day allow a "being there" experience. - Multiple-description coding (MDC) - redundant encoding of image/video (and other) data for increased resilience to channel errors, such as packet losses. -Statistical classification techniques for image segmentation and content-based browsing >From Item 4) 2001 Candidate Biographies ====================================================== Dr. Altunbasak received his B.S. from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey in 1992 with highest honors. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Rochester in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His Ph.D. research involved the areas of object scalable mesh-based video representation and coding with emphasis on interactive multimedia applications. Some of his algorithms are accepted (after modifications) for inclusion in the MPEG-4 Visual Working Draft (as part of SNHC) in October 1997. Dr. Altunbasak joined Hewlett Packard Research Laboratories, Palo Alto, California in July 1996. His position at HP Labs provided him with the opportunity to work on a diverse set of research topics. In his three years stay at HPL, he has been exposed to research projects in video and image processing, coding and networking. Dr. Altunbasak taught graduate level courses at Stanford and San Jose State Universities as a consulting assistant professor. He joined the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology in Fall 1999 as an assistant professor. He is currently working on projects related to interactive video, networked video and error resilient video with a research group of 8 Ph.D. students. His research efforts resulted in 38 publications and 17 patent applications. Dr. Altunbasak has served as technical reviewer for various journals in the field. He also serves as an area/associate editor for Signal Processing: Image Communications and Journal of Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing. ======== Mita D. Desai (Professor) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1985. She has since been employed as Research Scientist at Honeywell Systems and Research Center (1985-89), a Member of the Technical Staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (1989-92), a Visiting Professor at the Ecole National Superieur des Telecommunications, Paris, France (1992) and as Assistant Professor (1992-96), Associate Professor (1996-1999) and Professor (1999-2000) at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she was the founding Director of the Advanced Laboratory for Image Video Engineering (ALIVE). Currently she is a research professor at the Arizona State University in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and on an IPA assignment at the National Science Foundation as a program director first in the Division of Undergraduate Education and now as a program director for the Engineering Research Centers (ERC), Information Technology Research Initiative, Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative and revolutionary computing programs. Her current research interests are in the areas of radar and IR image processing, remote sensing using multispectral and hyperspectral data, biomedical image processing, multiresolution processing, and quantum information science. She has published more than 50 papers in these areas, has one patent pending, and has attracted more than $2 Million in funding to support her work. Dr. Desai has substantial involvement in professional society activities. She is a Senior Member of the IEEE, has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and is a member of the Editorial Board of the international journal Pattern Recognition. In addition, she served as the General Chair of the IEEE Southwest Symposium on Image Analysis and Interpretation, which was held in San Antonio in 1996. ========== Jean-Luc DUGELAY was born in Rouen (Normandy, France), in 1965. He joined the Eurecom Institute (Sophia Antipolis) in 1992, where he is currently in charge of image and video research and teaching activities inside the Multimedia Communications dept. He is currently with the Institut EURECOM, Multimedia Communications dept., Sophia Antipolis, France, as a Research Associate; and with the University of California, Santa Barbara, ECE dept., SCL Lab., as a Visiting Researcher. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Rennes in 1992 with the Advanced Image Coding and Processing Department at FRANCE TELECOM Research in Rennes (Brittany, France) where he worked on Stereoscopic TV and 3D Motion estimation. His main and current research interests are in the area of Multimedia signal processing, especially security imaging (i.e. Image & Video Watermarking, Image Indexing for Person Authentication and Recognition) He is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (IEEE MMSP TC) and an associate editor of the IEEE Trans. On Image Processing; Tech. Co-chair and organizer of the IEEE wksp. on MMSP 01. More information can be found at, http://www.eurecom.fr/~dugelay (jld@eurecom.fr) =========== Joseph M. Francos was born on November 6, 1959 in Tel-Aviv, Israel. He received the B.Sc. degree in computer engineering in 1982, and the D.Sc. degree in electrical engineering in 1990, both from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. >From 1982 to 1987, he was with the Signal Corps Research Laboratories, Israeli Defense Forces. From 1991 to 1992 he was with the Department of Electrical Computer and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, as a Visiting Assistant Professor. During 1993, he was with Signal Processing Technology, Palo Alto, CA. In 1993 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel, where he is now an Associate Professor. He also held visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, Cambridge, at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Davis, and at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Illinois, Chicago. His current research interests are in parametric modeling and estimation of 2-D random fields, random fields theory, parametric modeling and estimation of nonstationary signals, image and video modeling and indexing, texture analysis and synthesis, and space-time adaptive processing of radar data. Dr. Francos is a Senior Member of the IEEE Signal Processing and Information Theory societies. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He also served as a Publicity Chair and a member of the technical committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Workshop on Higher-Order Statistics (HOS'99). =============== Sheila S. Hemami (S'89-M'95) received the B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from The University of Michigan in 1990 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992 and 1994, respectively. At Stanford University, she held a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. She was with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, in 1994. In 1995, she joined the faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, where she is currently an associate professor. In Spring 2002, she will be the TI Visiting Associate Professor at Rice University. Dr. Hemami received a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award in 1997 and has received numerous teaching awards. She held the Kodak Term Professorship of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University from 1996-1999, and she was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in 2001. She is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. Her research interests are in image and video processing and transmission, including providing robustness and incorporating human visual system aspects. She has published over 50 conference and journal articles. ============ William Clem Karl (M'91-SM'00) received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1991 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, where he also received the S.M., E.E., and S.B. degrees. He held the position of Staff Research Scientist with the Brown-Harvard-M.I.T. Center for Intelligent Control Systems and the M.I.T. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems from 1992 to 1994. He joined the faculty of Boston University in 1995, where he is currently Associate Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering. Since January 1996 he has also held a joint appointment in the department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. He was Associate Editor of the Transactions on Image Processing from 1996 to 2000. Most recently, he served as session organizer and chair for the 2000 Conference in Information Sciences and Systems special session on Medical Imaging and is on the organizing committee for the First SIAM Conference on the Life Sciences. Dr. Karl's research interests are in the areas of multidimensional and multiscale signal and image processing, geometric estimation, detection, and medical signal and image processing. Prof. Karl is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Sigma Xi. ================= Faouzi Kossentini received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1989, 1990, and 1994, respectively. During 1995, Dr. Kossentini had been working as a research scientist at Nichols Research Corporation, Huntsville, AL, USA. Since January 1996, he has been employed as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, where he is involved in research in the areas of signal processing, communications and multimedia. Dr. Kossentini is currently on leave from the University of British Columbia, acting as the President and Chief Executive Officer of UB Video Inc., a 15-person company in the area of multimedia communications software. Dr. Kossentini has co-authored more than one hundred journal papers, conference papers, book chapters and patents. He has been active as a voting member, and recently as head of delegation, of the Canadian delegate to ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC29, which is responsible for the standardization of coded representation of audiovisual, multimedia, and hypermedia information. In particular, he has participated in most current JBIG/JPEG and MPEG-4 standardization activities. Dr. Kossentini has also participated in most current ITU-T low bit rate video coding standardization activities. Most notably, he is a co-author of the current ITU-T H.263 Test Model. Dr. Kossentini is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has served as a technical area coordinator and member of the technical program committee of ICIP-1997, and as a member of the technical program committees of ISCAS-1999, ISCAS-2000, and the 2000 Packet Video Workshop. He is also the Vice General Chairman of ICIP-2000. Dr. Kossentini is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, as well as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. ============ Sang Uk Lee (S'75-M'80-SM'99) received the B.S. degree from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1973, the M.S. degree from Iowa State University, Ames in 1976, and Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1980, all in electrical engineering. In 1980-1981, he was with the General Electric Company, Lynchburg, VA, working on the development of digital mobile radio. In 1981-1983, he was a Member of Technical Staff, M/A-COM Research Center, Rockvill, MD. In 1983, he joined the Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering at Seoul National University as an Assistant Professor, where he is now a Professor of the School of Electrical Engineering. Currently, he is also affiliated with the Automation and Systems Research Institute and the Institute of New Media and Communications at Seoul National University. His current research interests are in the areas of image and video signal processing, digital communication, and computer vision. He served as an editor-in-chief for the Transaction of the Korean Institute of Communication Science from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (Academic Press) and an Associate Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY. He is a member of Phi Kappa Phi. ============ Jin Li received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering all from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1990, 1991, and 1994, respectively. From 1994 to 1996, he served as a Research Associate at the University of Southern California. From 1996 to 1999, he was a member of the technical staff at the Sharp Laboratories of America (SLA), and represented the interests of SLA in the JPEG2000 and MPEG4 standardization efforts. He was a project leader in Microsoft Research China from 1999 to 2000. He is currently with Microsoft Research Redmond. He has been an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University since 2000. Dr. Li is a senior member of the IEEE, and the Associate Editor for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. He is the recipient of the 1998 Young Investigator Award from the SPIE Visual Communication and Image Processing, the 1994 Distinctive Ph.D. Thesis award from Tsinghua University and the 1991 Supreme Scholarship of Tsinghua University (the highest honor of Tsinghua University). Dr. Li has over 50 technical publications related to multimedia compression and communication. ================================ Robert Nowak received the B.S. (with highest distinction), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, 1992, and 1995, respectively. While working towards the Ph.D. degree, he was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. He has also worked at General Electric Medical Systems, and he holds a U.S. Patent for his work in volumetric computed tomography. During 1996-1999, he was an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. He is now an Assistant Professor at Rice University, Houston, Texas. His research interests include statistical image processing, pattern analysis, information theory, and multiscale analysis. He also studies applications in medical imaging and communication network tomography. Dr. Nowak received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1997, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Program Award in 1999, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award in 2000. ================= Ashok "Kris" Popat was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and 1990 respectively, and his PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 1997. Since 1997 he has been with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the Document Image Decoding group. His research has been in the areas of entropy-coded scalar quantization, image and video compression, texture analysis and synthesis, probabilistic modeling of image subbands, and document image analysis. Between 1983 and 1986 he worked part-time at Motorola/Codex on voiceband data communications and speech subband coding. Between 1986 and 1988, he was with the Hewlett-Packard Signal Analysis Division in Rohnert Park, CA. Between 1988 and 1990, as a research assistant at the MIT RLE Advanced Television Research Program, he contributed to a coding scheme for high-definition television that eventually evolved into the adopted standard. From 4/90 to 4/91, he was with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne), where he participated video coding research. During his doctoral studies at the MIT Media Lab, he worked part-time at PictureTel Corporation on efficient video sample rate conversion and denoising. Kris has authored two journal papers, several conference papers, a Swiss patent, co-authored a book chapter, and has five US patents pending. He regularly reviews papers for IEEE journals. He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi. Kris is married to Rita and has a sixteen-month-old daughter Aarthi. ================= Damon L. Tull received the B.S.E.E. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1991 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in 1993 and 1998 respectively. While at Northwestern he worked in the areas of image restoration, image sequence compression and motion estimation and was awarded the Lucent Technologies Cooperative Research Fellowship. Dr. Tull has worked with several companies including Motorola and Lucent Technologies and has publications and patents (pending) in areas including content interactive multimedia (MPEG-4), compressed image recovery, stereo video compression, motion estimation and image (sequence) restoration. Since 1998, he has been Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in digital image and video processing. His present interests are object based restoration techniques, image acquisition, digital cameras and fast recovery algorithms for wavelet based codecs. His recent work in object restoration generalized spatially varying distortions to the case of objects, facilitating the simultaneous restoration and segmentation of an image sequence using image motion. As President and CEO of DVIP Multimedia Incorporated he has developed new image acquisition technology for the next generation of digital cameras. Dr. Tull is a member of the IEEE and SPIE and has served as a reviewer for ICIP ('97 thru '00), IASTED Signal and Image Processing Conference ('98 - 99), IEEE Transactions in Image Processing, Evolutionary Computing, Signal Processing and the SPIE journal, Optical Engineering. He is also a member of the Screen Actors Guild. ================== Yehoshua Y. Zeevi is the Barbara and Norman Seiden Professor of Computer Sciences in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he served as the Dean, 1994-1999, and is currently the Head of the Center for Communication and Information Technologies (CCIT). He is a graduate of the Technion, received the M.Sc. from the University of Rochester, N.Y., and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Visiting Scientist at the Lawrence-Berkeley Laboratory, Vinton Hayes Fellow at Harvard University, where he has been a regular visitor over the last 25 years, and a Fellow-at-large of the MIT-NRP program. He was also a Visiting Professor at MIT and the CAIP Center of Rutgers University, and a Senior Visiting Scientist at the NTT Research Labs in Yokoska. Dr. Zeevi is the co-inventor of many patents and the author of over 250 papers and technical reports related to vision and image sciences and technology, and to signal processing (including 29 papers in IEEE Transactions and 38 in IEEE Conf. Proceedings.). His work on automatic gain control in vision led to the development of the Adaptive Sensitivity Camera that mimics the eye. He was one of the founders of i Sight, Inc., a company devoted to real-time image processing, and of UltraGuide; a medical technology company that develops visual guidance systems for interventional procedures under ultrasound imaging. He is a Fellow of the SPIE and the Academia Rodinesis (Stockholm, 1988-), where he serves also as the the Vice Chairman of the general assembly. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, published by Academic Press and the member of Editorial Boards of several journals. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Technion, of the Bicura ("First") Foundation, administered by the Israel Academy of Sciences, and of the Technion R&D Foundation. ===================================== Kai-Kuang Ma (S'80-M'84-SM'95) received his Ph.D. degree from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, M.S. degree from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, all in electrical engineering. >From 1984 to 1992, he was with IBM Corporation at Kingston, New York, >and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and engaged on various DSP and VLSI advanced product development. From 1992 to 1995, he joined Institute of Microelectronics, National University of Singapore. In early 1995, he joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, now a tenured Associate Professor. He has been focusing his research in the area of Image and Multimedia Signal Processing, including digital signal compression and standards, content-based image/video indexing and retrieval, joint source and channel coding for wireless image and video, wavelets and filter banks, nonlinear image processing, error concealment and artifact removal, clustering and pattern recognition, digital watermarking, and multimedia networking and quality of service. Since 1997, Dr. Ma has been serving as Singapore MPEG Chairman and Head of Delegation, while simultaneously supervising JPEG and their parent level, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 for Singapore. Two versions of Diamond Search produced from his research group have been adopted by MPEG-4 in July 1999 and March 2000, respectively, as the reference core technology for fast motion estimation. He is the General Chair and Organizing Chair of a series of international standard meetings (MPEG and JPEG), JPEG2000 and MPEG-7 workshops held in Singapore, 2-13 March 2001. Since 1997, Dr. Ma has been serving as the Editor (in the area of Video and Signal Processing) of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is also guest editing a special issue of Image and Video Indexing and Retrieval, for International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology. Since 2000, he has been serving as the Chairman of Singapore Chapter of IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has been acting as program committee member and session chair of multiple IEEE international conferences, and reviewing numerous papers for more than a dozen of IEEE transactions and other well-cited international journals, as well as various conferences. Dr. Ma is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of Sigma Xi and Eta Kappa Nu. He holds one patent (pending) on digital image and video. =========================================================== Ricardo L. de Queiroz received the B.S. degree from Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil, in 1987, the M.S. degree from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree from University of Texas at Arlington, in 1994, all in Electrical Engineering. His graduate work was concentrated on the areas of lapped transforms and on image compression. In 1990-1991, he was with the DSP research group at Universidade de Brasilia, as a research associate working on lapped transforms for image compression. At the same time he started a company aimed at developing distributed alpha pictorial databases over low bitrate lines. He joined Xerox Corp. in August 1994, at the end of his doctorate, where he is currently a member of the research staff at the Color and Digital Imaging Systems Lab and a Project Leader for the Image Science group. Ricardo has contributed chapters to books, and published extensively in Journals and conferences: 30+ Journal papers and 40+ conference ones. He also holds more than 20 issued patents, while many others are are still pending. These papers and patents are in diverse areas ranging from multirate filter banks to color mapping. He received grants over all his graduate school years, including several scholarships and grants from the Brazilian government and an Academic Excellence Award from the University of Texas at Arlington. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters and a senior member of IEEE. He is also very active in the local chapter, serving as Chair of the Rochester chapter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He also actively organized the yearly held Western New York Image Processing Workshop, since its inception. For these activities he received an Outstanding Activity Award from the local section. He is also an Adjunct Faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a member of IS&T. His research interests are multirate signal processing, image and signal compression, color imaging, processing compressed data, multimedia and image understanding . ---------------------- ICIP participation list of countries (From Item 2) >From Iannis Pitas: (Preregistrations) COUNTRY PERSONS United States 190 Japan 89 France 68 United Kingdom 55 Germany 38 Korea, South 37 Italy 31 Greece 30 Canada 28 Spain 28 Switzerland 26 Netherlands 24 China 18 Taiwan 18 Australia 17 Israel 16 Singapore 15 Belgium 12 Portugal 12 Sweden 11 Brazil 9 Finland 7 Korea, North 7 Turkey 7 Ireland 5 Ghana 5 Austria 4 Iran 4 Nigeria 3 India 2 New Zeeland 2 Norway 2 Poland 2 Slovakia 2 Argentina 1 Armenia 1 Cyprus 1 Liechtenstein 1 Luxemburg 1 Mexico 1 Russia 1 Slovenia 1 South Africa 1 Thailand 1