Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 18:12:44 +0000

From: Lambert Schomaker 

To: Rangachar Kasturi 

Subject: TC-11 title



To: Prof. Rangachar Kasturi, 

    1st Vice President of the IAPR and

    Chair of the Technical Committees 



Dear Prof. Kasturi,



     within the TC-11 community, a concern was present that the

theoretical aspects of the research were somewhat underrepresented.

Apart of the verbal comments which could be heard in recent ICDARs,

this concern was also apparent from an informal proposal to change

the title from "Applications in Text Processing" into "Theory and

Applications in Text Processing". A poll was executed on Internet

to gauge the prevailing opinion with respect to a consolidation

of this title. Of 230 recipients there was a unanimous response

of 34 persons to accept the 'theoretical' title. However, this issue 

caused a lively discussion concerning the interpretation of the concept 

of "Text Processing", which is open to multiple interpretations.

Notably, these words pertain to a stream of research which is only

focused on ASCII string manipulation (cf. computational linguistics),

research areas which are in any case remote from the field of Pattern

Recognition. After a lively discussion which involved both the young 

and the famous from universities as well as companies in our community, 

a new title has been proposed. The solution contains the following 

elements:



      - "TC-11: Reading Systems" would be the title,



      - in the text on the TC-11 home page on WWW which summarizes our 

        research area, both "Theory" and "Applications" are underlined

        (cf. http://hwr.nici.kun.nl/iapr/tc-11/title.html),

        and, finally,



      - an accentuation of the balance between Theory and Application 

        is graphically depicted by the suggested logo for TC-11.

        The vertical axis represents the Reading System, the

        horizontal axis represents Theory versus Praxis 

        (cf. attachment).



The new title is broad enough to capture all areas (traditional OCR,

pen-based computing in hand-held computers, up to text recognition in 

live video) but yet at the same time it does not conflict with the work

performed in the communities which are represented by the other 

Technical Committees. Several reactions from TC-10 members confirmed a 

satisfaction with this proposal as compared to other tentative 

proposals for the new TC-11 title.



Since the community has displayed a clear interest in balancing

theory and application, an explicit addition of "Theory" to the

title was considered to be overdone, especially considering the fact 

that the titles of the other Technical Committees do not contain a

similar qualifier. 



The concept of "Reading Systems" is already of a more abstract nature

than the previous title, which creates space for fundamental 

perspectives on the work done in TC-11, satisfying the need for an

improved balance between theory and practical applications. The

word "Reading" stresses the presence of sensors to the physical

world, which distinguishes our Pattern-Recognition efforts from 

the efforts in coded-text processing.



In conclusion, as the chairman of TC-11, I would kindly ask you

to support a change of the title of our technical committee from



  "TC-11: Applications in Text Processing Systems"



             to



  "TC-11: Reading Systems".



In case additional information is required by you or the Governing

Board, I would be most happy to provide further clarification.



Looking forward to receive your reaction,

sincerely,



prof. dr. Lambert Schomaker