IAPR/ICDAR 2013 Awards
The IAPR Technical Committees on Graphics Recognition (TC10) and Reading Systems (TC11) are pleased to announce the recipients of the IAPR/ICDAR 2013 Awards.
The IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award is presented to Prof. Réjean Plamondon for theoretical contributions to the understanding of human movement and its applications to signature verification, handwriting recognition, instruction, and health assessment, and for promoting on-line document processing in numerous multidisciplinary fields.
Prof. Plamondon will deliver the Opening Keynote Speech at ICDAR2013 in Washington, D.C.
The IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award is presented to Dimosthenis Karatzas for outstanding service to the ICDAR community in a variety of roles, as well as innovative research in human perception-based document analysis.
Congratulations to the awardees!
The awards ceremony will be held during ICDAR2013 in Washington, D.C., USA.
ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award Winner
Réjean Plamondon received a B.Sc. degree in Physics, and M.Sc.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Laval, Québec, Canada in 1973, 1975 and 1978 respectively. In 1978, he joined the faculty of École Polytechnique, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada, where he is currently a Full Professor. He has been Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1996 to 1998 and President of École Polytechnique from 1998 to 2002. He is Head of Laboratoire Scribens, the research group that he founded at this institution. He is a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS; 1989), of IAPR (1994) and IEEE (2000).
Professor Plamondon is a leader in the fields of analysis and processing of on-line and off-line handwriting. Studying and modeling the emergent properties of neuromotor systems involved in the generation of human motions, he proposed, in collaboration with his students and co-workers, innovative solutions to technical problems for the design of automated systems dedicated to the verification of signatures, the recognition of handwriting as well as interactive tools to help children learning to write. He contributed developing robust methods for the analysis and interpretation of neuromuscular information from handwriting kinematic signals to characterize the fine motor skills in healthy persons or patients suffering from various diseases. His main fundamental contribution is the development of a Kinematic Theory of rapid human movements that describes, using a family of lognormal equations, the majority of psychophysical phenomena reported in the last century on rapid human movements. The theory has been successfully used to characterize the essential properties of the velocity profiles of the fingers, wrist, head and eye movements and its main physiological hypotheses have been verified using EEG and EMG techniques.
Professor Plamondon has had a strong influence in the ICDAR community by writing comprehensive survey papers that have oriented the development of research for many years after their publication. He is the author or co-author of more than 300 publications and owner of four patents. He has edited or co-edited five books and several Special Issues of scientific journals. He has also published a children book, a short story and three collections of poems. All over his career, he has worked and collaborated with scientists from many countries.
Professor Plamondon has been a co-founder of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS) in 1985 and President of this association from 1995 to 2007. He held in Montréal, in 1987, the first multidisciplinary conference, sponsored by IGS and IEEE, dedicated to handwriting analysis, grouping not only psychologists, education specialists and neuroscientists but also a strong delegation of researchers from computer sciences, engineering, forensic sciences and robotics. Elected chair of TC-11 in 1988, he played a crucial political role in coordinating the emergence the two major conferences in our field: IWFHR in 1990 and ICDAR in 1991. He established the democratic tradition of having all members of our community voting for the organization of the forthcoming conferences. He also contributed to the development of the French language ICDAR community by the promoting the establishment of the CNED/CIFED conferences for the francophone. He also played an important role in the creation of the Unipen foundation, the first large on-line database available for benchmarking tests. After his TC mandate in 1995, he was named chair of the IAPR conferences and meeting committee, where he coordinated the TC-1,-2,-10and 11 activities to stimulate the expansion of the ICDAR community within IAPR. He has been involved in the organization of all IWFHR/ICFHR, ICDAR, and IGS conferences, (except for the period when he was president of his own institution) at least as a member of the program committee and often with more important roles (general co-chair IWFHR 1994; general co-chair ICDAR 1995, ICDAR 2001 and ICPR 2002; general chair, CIFED 1998) as well as a regular keynote speaker (recently at CIFED 2008, ICPR 2008, ICFHR 2010, ICFHR 2012)
ICDAR Young Investigator Award Winner
Dimosthenis Karatzas is a "Ramon y Cajal" senior research fellow at the Computer Vision Centre, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. A physicist by education, he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool, UK in 2003.
He has worked and published on a variety of document analysis areas, including historical, administrative, camera based and Web document analysis. In addition, he has made research contributions in various other domains including colour perception, signal processing and sensor technologies. His current research activities are related to scene text extraction, gaze-based interfaces for document analysis, colour perception and document indexing and retrieval. Dr Karatzas has led various research and technology transfer projects, while he is the technical director of the spin-off company TruColour Ltd, UK.
He served as Publications Chair for ICDAR 2009 and Publicity Chair of ACPR 2013, while he is regularly serving on the program committees of ICDAR, DAS and CBDAR. In 2009 he acted as the general chair of the Winter School on Eye-Tracking Methodologies, organised under the auspices of the Spanish chapter of the IAPR.
He served as the dataset curator of the IAPR TC-11 from 2009 until 2012, and is currently the TC-11 vice-chair. Dr Karatzas is a member of the IAPR-Industrial Liaison Committee. He is also a member of the IEEE, while he has been a founding member and a member of the executive committee of the UK Chapter of the SPIE.