# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## August, 2023 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [August 2023 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2023_08) **TC-11:** [TC-11 Homepage](http://www.iapr-tc11.org)    **Twitter:** [iapr_tc11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) ### TABLE OF CONTENTS - Message from the Editor - Dates and Deadlines - Deadlines - Upcoming Conferences and Events - Post-doctoral positions at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona - Datasets - TC11 Datasets Repository - ScalDoc Workshop Discusses Document Analysis Datasets - Where to share datasets Message from the Editor ======================= Dear TC11 members, I hope that you have had a nice ICDAR, for those who attended the conference, and for the rest, we hope to see you in the next ICDAR 2024 in Athens, Greece. ICDAR 2023 was a big success, with a total of 316 papers submitted to the main conference (plus 33 papers to the ICDAR-IJDAR journal track). 53 papers were accepted for oral presentation (plus 13 IJDAR track papers) and 101 for poster presentation. The post-conference featured 8 great workshops, 4 beneficial tutorials, and the ever-interesting doctoral consortium. Don't miss the next September issue of this newsletter where we will communicate about the awards of ICDAR 2023, share information about the next 3 ICDARs, and publish several calls with their deadlines. In the data repository section of this issue, you will find a brief summary of the discussions of the ICDAR 2023 ScalDoc workshop, with an invitation link to join the efforts related to *document analysis datasets*. This issue also contains ***two new job offers*** for post-doc positions at the CVC, Barcelona. And as usual, I would like to remind you to check out the upcoming events of 2023 and 2024. With the approaching start of the school year, it is not too early to start preparing for ICDAR 2024 submissions, whether for scientific papers, or for workshop, competition and/or tutorial proposals (deadline around the end of this coming October). **Nibal Nayef, TC11 Communication Officer** ( ) **Join us!** If you are not already a member of the TC11 community, please consider joining the [TC11 mailing list](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=iapr-tc11&A=1). **Follow us on Twitter (iapr\_tc11):** Dates and Deadlines =================== Deadlines --------- **2023** - **October 31** proposal submission for ICDAR 2024 competitions, workshops & tutorials Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2023 and 2024** - [TPDL 2023](https://tpdl2023.dei.unipd.it/). Zadar, Croatia (September 26-29, 2023) - [ACPR 2023](https://ericlab.org/acpr2023/). Kitakyushu, Japan (November 5-8, 2023) - [ICDAR 2024](https://icdar2024.net/). Athens, Greece (August 30 - September 4, 2024) - [ICPR 2024](https://icpr2024.org/). Kolkata, India (December 01-05, 2024) Post-doctoral positions at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona ================================================================ We are seeking two postdoctoral researchers to join the Vision, Language and Reading group at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), in Barcelona, Spain, one focused on FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY and another in COMPUTER VISION. The position is available for a minimum of 2 years and is linked to the "European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI" (ELSA), a European Project funded by Horizon Europe and backed by the ELLIS network of excellence. The project covers research topics that include robustness, privacy and human agency and will develop use cases in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, health and document intelligence. **CANDIDATES' PROFILE** The candidate should possess a PhD in machine learning or computer vision and have a strong publication record. We are looking for candidates who have publications in top conferences like CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICDAR, NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR. The candidate should have a strong background in machine learning and computer vision. Experience on document image analysis and/or visual question answering would be positive. The applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and independence. The candidate is expected to co-supervise PhD students. The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project. **THE COMPUTER VISION CENTER** The selected candidate will work in the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), Barcelona, a research institute comprising more than 130 researchers and support staff, dedicated to computer vision research and knowledge transfer. With a strong international projection and links to the industry, the Computer Vision Centre offers an exciting environment for scientific career development. The Computer Vision Centre has a plan for expansion of its permanent research staff base and has received the "HR Excellence in Research" award as a provider and supporter of a stimulating and favorable working environment. The direct responsible for these posts will be Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas, leading the Vision, Language and Reading research group at the CVC. Barcelona is a vibrant city and an important Artificial Intelligence hub. The high quality of life is combined with an open and international looking character of the city. Barcelona is very well connected by air, sea and ground transportation. The region of Catalonia boosts its own AI strategy, in which the CVC is a key player. **RESEARCH CONTACT** If you are interested in the position, please contact Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas for more information (dimos\@cvc.uab.es) **APPLICATION PROCESS** Apply by filling in the online form at the bottom of the offer: Computer Vision: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/07/26/20230726-elsa-cv/ FL and DP: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2022/12/07/postdoc-federated-learning-and-differential-privacy/ Datasets ======== TC11 Datasets Repository ------------------------ ### ScalDoc Workshop Discusses Document Analysis Datasets The ICDAR 2023 [workshop on Scaling-up Document Image Understanding](http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/scaldoc2023/) aimed at opening the discussion on possible ways to widen our community through the use of data preparation efforts and the definition of large-scale (grand) challenges that drive progress in the field. Fruitful discussions have led to the creation of a Slack channel to gather academic and industrial researchers willing to collaborate on the creation of a "dataset of datasets". - This effort should enable the training and evaluation of new foundation models for document understanding - A first meeting is scheduled on **Wed. 2023-09-13, at 19:00 UTC+2** to maximize participation around the globe - Don't hesitate and join us, we are already \~20! - Invitation link: https://bit.ly/datasetofdatasets ### Where to share datasets Did you know it? We have two official places for datasets: - Our historical platform for storage and listing: http://datasets.iapr-tc11.org - A Zenodo community (if you choose to submit your datasets there): https://zenodo.org/communities/iapr-tc11 TC11 maintains a collection of datasets that can be found online in the [TC11 Datasets Repository](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets). If you have new datasets (e.g., from competitions) that you wish to share with the research community, please use the [online upload form](http://tc11.cvc.uab.es/upload/). For questions and support, please contact the TC11 Dataset Curator (contact information is below). **Joseph Chazalon (TC11 Dataset Curator)** ( ) Contributions and Subscriptions ================================== **Call for Contributions:** To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, [Nibal Nayef](mailto:n.nayef@gmail.com). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, job opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC11 community. **Subscription:** This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To join the TC11 mailing list, please click on [this link](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=iapr-tc11&A=1). To manage your subscription, please visit the [mailing list homepage](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IAPR TC11 HOMEPAGE: [http://www.iapr-tc11.org](http://www.iapr-tc11.org) The IAPR is the International Association for Pattern Recognition. IAPR's Technical Committee No. 11 (TC11) includes researchers and practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.