Difference between revisions of "IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2018 10"

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== ICDAR 2019: Call for Competitions ==
 
== ICDAR 2019: Call for Competitions ==

Revision as of 03:34, 31 October 2018

IAPR logo.gif Tc-11 Logo v2 72dpi.png

October, 2018



Click on the buttons below to view sections of the newsletter.

  • Message from the Editor
  • Dates and Deadlines
    • Deadlines
    • Upcoming Conferences and Events
  • Kaggle “Quick, Draw!” Doodle Recognition Challenge
  • Calls for Papers
    • ICDAR: Call for Papers
    • ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track (New for ICDAR 2019 - repost)
      • Format
      • Procedure and Deadlines
      • Q&A
  • ICDAR 2019: Competition, Workshop & Tutorial Proposals
    • ICDAR 2019: Call for Competitions
    • ICDAR 2019: Call for Workshops
    • ICDAR 2019: Call for Tutorials
  • Journals
    • IJDAR: Latest Issue (Vol. 21, Issue 4)
    • IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)
    • MDPI Journal of Imaging: Special Issue on Document Image Processing
  • Report: ICFHR 2018 (Niagara Falls, USA - repost)
  • Datasets (repost)
  • Careers
    • Faculty Positions at the University of Michigan (USA)
    • IRISA/INSA Rennes (France): Research Engineer/PostDoc Position (3 Years - repost)
    • Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR - repost)



Greetings! Happily, there are again many new things to look at in this month’s newsletter. Here is a brief summary of the current goings-on in the TC-11 community.

Preparations for our flagship conference, ICDAR 2019 are now in full swing. You will find calls for papers, competitions, workshops and tutorials in this edition of the newsletter. For those looking to submit to the ICDAR-IJDAR dual journal/conference track, please note that the deadline is soon (Nov. 15). Competition, workshop, and tutorial proposals are also due soon (Nov. 20/30).

Publications-wise, a new issue of IJDAR was released this month, along with the MDPI Journal of Imaging Special Issue on Document Image Processing. For those looking for a challenge, there is a new Kaggle competition on handwritten doodle recognition. The competition includes cash prizes; see the news item for details.

On the employment front, there are multiple tenure-track faculty positions available at the University of Michigan (USA), along with a postdoctoral fellowship at IRISA (France). As always, we include a link to the IAPR internship page, which should be of interest to students.

Finally, we are very pleased to announce that DAS 2020 will be held in Wuhan (China) from May 17-20, 2020. Congratulations to General Chairs Cheng-Lin Liu, Shijian Lu, and Jean-Marc Ogier, and to the Organizing Chair Xiang Bai who put together the winning bid.

Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC-11 community, please consider joining the TC11 mailing list. Follow us on Twitter (iapr_tc11): https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11

Richard Zanibbi, TC-11 Communications Officer
( rxzvcs@rit.edu )

ICDAR2019.png



Deadlines

2018

2019

Upcoming Conferences and Events

2018

2019 and Later

  • ICDAR 2019, Sydney, Australia (September 22-25, 2019)
  • ICFHR 2020. Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10, 2020)
  • DAS 2020. Wuhan, China (May 17-20, 2020)
  • ICFHR 2022. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022)



The Quick, Draw Doodle Recognition Challenge on kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/c/quickdraw-doodle-recognition) is a large scale classification task on online drawing data. The challenge is based on the Quick, Draw dataset of 50 million drawings (https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/data) and we hope to encourage further research in the exciting field of online handwriting and drawing recognition.

There is a total of $25,000 USD in prize money. Please consider participating!

Thomas Deselaers, Google Switzerland
( deselaers@google.com )



ICDAR: Call for Papers

The [[|15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition]] will be held in Sydney, Australia from September 20-25, 2019. ICDAR is the premier international gathering for researchers, scientist and practitioners in the document analysis community.

Important Dates

Feb 15, 2019  Paper Submission Deadline
May 15, 2019  Author Notification
Jun 15, 2019  Camera-Ready Papers Due

ICDAR was established nearly three decades ago, and is endorsed by IAPR-TC 10/11. The 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019) is being organised by University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia and will be held at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Sydney. The conference General Chairs are Michael Blumenstein and Umapada Pal.

Accepted papers will be published by IEEE Computer Society’s Conference Publishing Services (CPS) and included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Topics of Interest include, but not limited to:

  • Document Image Processing
  • Physical and logical layout analysis
  • Character and text recognition
  • Pen‐based document analysis
  • Historical document analysis
  • Document analysis systems
  • Symbol and graphics recognition
  • Document forensics
  • Human document interaction
  • Scene text detection and recognition
  • Document retrieval
  • Signature verification and writer identification
  • Multimedia documents
  • Performance evaluation
  • Machine learning for document analysis
  • Applications of document analysis
  • Cognitive issues of documents
  • Semantic information extraction from documents
  • Document summarization classification and translation
  • Document simulation and synthesis

Submission and Review

ICDAR 2019 will follow a double blind review process. Authors should not include their names and affiliations anywhere in the manuscript. Authors should also ensure that their identity is not revealed indirectly by citing their previous work in the third person, and omitting including acknowledgements until the camera-ready version.

Paper format and length

Papers accepted for the conference will be allocated 6 pages in the proceedings, with the option of purchasing up to 2 extra pages for AUD 100 per page. This will have to be paid after paper acceptance and at the time of registration. The length of the submitted manuscript should match that intended for final publication. Therefore, if you are unwilling or unable to pay the extra charge you should limit your paper to 6 pages. Otherwise the page limit is 8 pages.

Cheng-Lin Liu, Andreas Dengel, and Rafael Lins, ICDAR 2019 Program Chairs
( liucl@nlpr.ia.ac.cn, dengel@dfki.uni-kl.de, rdl@ufpe.br )

ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track (New for ICDAR 2019 - repost)

New: IJDAR Journal Track at ICDAR 2019

For the first time, ICDAR 2019 (http://www.icdar2019.org) is opening a journal track that will offer the benefit of the rapid turnaround and dissemination times of a conference while providing the paper length, scientific rigor, and careful review process of an archival journal.

Important Dates

Nov. 15, 2018:  Initial submission deadline
Jan. 15, 2019:  Initial decisions (accept, minor/major revision, reject)
Feb. 15, 2019:  ICDAR regular paper submission deadline 
Apr. 15, 2019:  Submission deadline of the revised version 
                of IJDAR papers
 May 30, 2019:  Final decisions (accept to journal track, 
                or move to journal-only process)

The ICDAR-IJDAR journal track invites high-quality submissions that present original work in the areas of Document Analysis and Recognition appropriate to both the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) and the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR, Impact Factor: 1.298). Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of IJDAR, and will receive an oral presentation slot at the ICDAR 2019 conference.

Journal versions of previously published conference papers or survey papers will not be considered for this special issue. Such submissions can be submitted as journal-only papers via the regular IJDAR procedures.

Authors who submit their work to the journal track commit themselves to present their results at the ICDAR conference in case of acceptance. Springer-Nature, the publisher of IJDAR, will make the papers accepted for the journal track freely available in a time frame of four weeks around the conference, beyond being available in the archival journal.

Format

Papers submitted to the journal track should follow the format of IJDAR submissions and all of the standard guidelines (https://www.springer.com/computer/image+processing/journal/10032).

Procedure and Deadlines

The deadline for journal track submissions is November 15th 2018. Earlier submissions are strongly encouraged in order to facilitate the reviewing process that will follow the IJDAR standards. A first decision about the papers should be released to the authors by January 15th, 2019.

Accepted papers will be scheduled for publication in the special issue and for presentation at ICDAR 2019. The authors of rejected papers are encouraged to submit their paper to ICDAR, following the conference guidelines.

Authors of papers accepted with minor or major revision should submit the revised version of their paper by April 15th 2019. However, if the revised paper does not fulfill the recommendations of reviewers, it will be forwarded to the regular IJDAR reviewing pipeline and will not be presented at ICDAR.

The final decision about the journal track papers should be released before May 30th 2019. Papers still under review at this date will remain in the reviewing pipeline of the journal. The deadline for camera ready versions of the accepted papers in the journal track will be June 25th and the expected publication date of the Special Issue is September 5th 2019, just before ICDAR 2019.

This special issue is a joint initiative of the board of editors of IJDAR and the Program Chairs of ICDAR 2019.

  • Andreas Dengel, Rafael Dueire Lins, Cheng-Lin Liu: Program Chairs of ICDAR 2019
  • Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti, Simone Marinai: Editors-in-Chief of IJDAR

Q&A

For any information about this initiative, please email one of the editors of this special issue or consult the FAQ that will be posted on the IJDAR website (https://www.springer.com/computer/image+processing/journal/10032).

Cheng-Lin Liu, ICDAR 2019 Program Co-Chair
( liucl@nlpr.ia.ac.cn )



Syndey, Australia, Sept. 20-25, 2019

ICDAR 2019: Call for Competitions

15th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
Sydney, Australia
September 22 – 25, 2019

The ICDAR2019 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions that aim at evaluating the performance of algorithms and methods related to areas of document analysis and recognition.

Important Dates

Nov 20, 2018  Proposal Due
Dec 30, 2018  Acceptance Notification
Apr 30, 2019  Suggested deadline for Competition participants
May 15, 2019  Initial Submission of Competition Reports Deadline
Jun 15, 2019  Camera-Ready Papers Due

You are cordially invited to submit a proposal, that should contain the following information:

  • A brief description of the competition, including what the particular task under evaluation is and why this competition is of interest to the ICDAR community.
  • A draft of the outline of the competition describing competition schedule, the expected number of participants and its rationale, which data is planned to be used, how will the submitted methods be evaluated and which performance measures will be used.
  • The names, contact information, and brief CVs of the competition organizers, outlining previous experience in performance evaluation and/or organizing competitions.

The following rules shall apply to the accepted Competitions:

  • Name of competition must be standardized by starting with “ICDAR 2019” e.g. “ICDAR2019 Competition on …” or “ICDAR 2019 … Competition.”
  • Datasets used in the competitions must be made available after the end of the competitions. In principle, the organizers should submit the dataset to: http://tc11.cvc.uab.es
  • Evaluation methodologies and metrics used must be described in detail so that results can be replicated later.
  • The results of competitions will be announced during a dedicated session of the ICDAR 2019 conference.
  • The basic length of reports of competitions is the same as the regular paper (i.e., 6 pages). If there are circumstances to be considered, upon request, Competition Chairs may allow additional pages.
  • The results of competitions will be announced during a dedicated session of the ICDAR 2019 conference.
  • Each competition has to be presented with a poster at a prominent place at the conference venue, selected competitions will get the chance to be presented orally in the dedicated session mentioned above.

Based on the analysis of the received proposals, the competitions chairs will first synchronize with the competition organizers and then submit a proposal to the program committee, in order to finalize the organization of the competitions.

Proposal Submission

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Competition Chairs (Luiz Oliveira and Marcus Liwicki) via: marcus.liwicki@unifr.ch and lesoliveira@inf.ufpr.br.

Inquiries

For any inquiries you may have regarding the competitions, please contact the ICDAR2017 Competition Chairs (Luiz Eduarde S. Olivera and Marcus Liwicki).

Luiz Oliveira and Marcus Liwicki, ICDAR 2019 Competition Chairs
( marcus.liwicki@unifr.ch, lesoliveira@inf.ufpr.br )

ICDAR 2019: Call for Workshops

15th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
Sydney, Australia
September 22 – 25, 2019

The ICDAR 2019 Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops that will be held before the commencement of the main conference.

Important Dates

Proposal Due:              November 30, 2018
Acceptance Notification:   December 30, 2018
Dates of Workshops:        September 20-21, 2019

Researchers interested in organizing workshops at ICDAR2019 are invited to submit a proposal that includes the following:

  • Title
  • Preference for duration (full day or half day) and date (September 21 and/or 22)
  • Scope and motivation
  • Topics
  • Relevance for ICDAR
  • Potential program committee
  • Short CV of organizers

In order to facilitate innovative collaboration and engagement between members of other research communities and the document analysis community, the Workshop Chairs strongly encourage researchers to submit proposals on recent important topics as these topics are also very much related to the document analysis community. Workshops proposing discussions about topics dealing with an open vision of the notion of documents are also welcome.

Notes:

  • The ICDAR organizers will handle the workshop registration and provide workshop space, coffee breaks and other facilities required to organize workshops (c.f., a room, a projector and a screen). In addition, a free registration is provided to the workshop organizers.
  • About proceedings:
    • Workshop proceedings will be published by IEEE Conference Publishing Services through the ICDAR organizers.
    • Please set the camera-ready due date at July 5, 2019 or prior.
    • The front matter (preface, title page and so on) and the paper order with session dividers are provided from the workshop organizers to the ICDAR2019 Publication Chairs. (Its due date will be set around the same date as camera-ready papers.)
    • Proceeding costs will also be borne by the ICDAR organizers.
    • If the conditions above are not met, the proceedings will not be published through the ICDAR organizers, and they will need to be published locally by the workshop organizers.
  • If a workshop incurs costs for invited speakers, the workshop organizers are required to bear that cost. The workshop organizers may solicit sponsorship to cover the relevant costs. They may use the free registration for the invited speaker.

Submission Guidelines and Inquiries

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Workshop Chairs (Jean-Marc Ogier and Seiichi Uchida) via:

icdar2019-workshop -at- human.ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp  
(please replace -at- with atmark)

For any inquiries you may have regarding the workshops, please contact us via the above email.

Jean-Marc Ogier and Seiichi Uchida, ICDAR 2019 Workshop Chairs
( jean-marc.ogier@univ-lv.fr, uchida@ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp )

ICDAR 2019: Call for Tutorials

15th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
Sydney, Australia
September 22 – 25, 2019

The 15th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019) will take place in Sydney, Australia. ICDAR2019 Organizing Committee invites proposals for the Tutorial Program, to be held on September 22, 2019 (Sunday).

Important Dates

Proposals Due:        November 30, 2018
Notifications:        December 20, 2018

ICDAR2019 Tutorials should serve one or more of the following objectives:

  • Introduce students and newcomers to major topics of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) research.
  • Provide instructions on established practices and methodologies.
  • Survey a mature area of DAR research and/or practice.
  • Motivate and explain a DAR topic of emerging importance.
  • Introduce expert non-specialists to a DAR subarea.

Proposals should be up to four pages in length, and should contain the following information:

  • A brief description of the tutorial, suitable for inclusion in the conference registration brochure.
  • A detailed outline of the tutorial. Due to the agenda constraints, only half day tutorials are accepted.
  • Characterization of the potential target audience for the tutorial, including prerequisite knowledge.
  • A description of why the tutorial topic would be of interest to a substantial part of the ICDAR audience.
  • A brief resume of the presenter(s), which should include name, postal address, phone number, e-mail address, web page, background in the tutorial area, any available example of work in the area (ideally, a published tutorial-level article on the subject), evidence of teaching experience (including references that address the proposer’s presentation skills), and evidence of scholarship in the area.
  • The name and e-mail address of the corresponding presenter. The corresponding presenter should be available for e-mail correspondence during the evaluation process, in the case clarifications and discussions on the scope and content of the proposal are needed.

The evaluation of the proposal will take into account its general interest for ICDAR attendees, the quality of the proposal (e.g., a tutorial that simply lists a set of concepts without any apparent rationale behind them will not be approved) as well as the expertise and skills of the presenters. We emphasize that the primary criteria for evaluation will be whether a proposal is interesting, well-structured, and motivated in relation to Document Analysis and Recognition, rather than the perceived experience/standing of the proposer.

Last but not least, the tutorial should attract a meaningful audience, cover hot topics and incorporate new knowledge to the community. Those submitting a proposal should keep in mind that tutorials are intended to provide an overview of the field; they should present reasonably well established information in a balanced way. Tutorials should not be used to advocate a single avenue of research, nor should they promote a product.

Tutorial slides must be provided to us for inclusion on the conference website and also on the TC-10 and TC-11 websites, as educational material.

Tutorial presenters will receive ONE free conference registration per tutorial.

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Tutorial Chairs, Daniel Lopresti (lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu) and Josep Lladós (Josep.Llados@uab.cat), no later than November 30th, 2018. Feedback, comments and/or suggestions would be provided within two weeks of receiving the proposal. Final acceptance (or rejection) will be decided by December 30th, 2018.

Daniel Lopresti and Josep Lladós, ICDAR 2019 Tutorial Chairs
( lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu, Josep.Llados@uab.cat )



IJDAR: Latest Issue (Vol. 21, Issue 4)

The latest issue of IJDAR was released in mid-October. Click on the links below to go directly to the Springer Link page for each article.

Table of Contents

  1. Building efficient CNN architecture for offline handwritten Chinese character recognition. Zhiyuan Li, Nanjun Teng, Min Jin & Huaxiang Lu
  2. A comprehensive study of hybrid neural network hidden Markov model for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition. Zi-Rui Wang, Jun Du, Wen-Chao Wang, Jian-Fang Zhai & Jin-Shui Hu
  3. Augmented incremental recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions. Khanh Minh Phan, Anh Duc Le, Bipin Indurkhya & Masaki Nakagawa
  4. A combined strategy of analysis for the localization of heterogeneous form fields in ancient pre-printed records. Aurélie Lemaitre, Jean Camillerapp, Cérès Carton & Bertrand Coüasnon
  5. KERTAS: dataset for automatic dating of ancient Arabic manuscripts. Kalthoum Adam, Asim Baig, Somaya Al-Maadeed, Ahmed Bouridane & Sherine El-Menshawy

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti and Simone Marinai, IJDAR Editors-in-Chief
( kise@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp, lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu, simone.marinai@unifi.it )

MDPI Journal of Imaging: Special Issue on Document Image Processing

The MDPI Journal of Imaging Special Issue on Document Image Processing has been released! The Guest editors are Ergina Kavallieratou and Laurence Likforman-Sulem. All articles are open access, and may be downloaded from the link below:

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jimaging/special_issues/document_image_processing

Table of Contents

  1. Editorial: Document Image Processing

(L. Likforman Sulem and E. Kavallieratou)

  1. Non-Local Sparse Image Inpainting for Document Bleed-Through Removal

(Muhammad Hanif, Anna Tonazzini, Pasquale Savino and Emanuele Salerno)

  1. A New Binarization Algorithm for Historical Documents

(Marcos Almeida, Rafael Dueire Lins, Rodrigo Bernardino, Darlisson Jesus and Bruno Lima)

  1. Slant Removal Technique for Historical Document Images

(Ergina Kavallieratou, Laurence Likforman-Sulem and Nikos Vasilopoulos)

  1. Text/Non-Text Separation from Handwritten Document Images Using LBP Based Features: An Empirical Study

(Sourav Ghosh, Dibyadwati Lahiri, Showmik Bhowmik, Ergina Kavallieratou and Ram Sarkar)

  1. A Holistic Technique for an Arabic OCR System

(Farhan M. A. Nashwan, Mohsen A. A. Rashwan, Hassanin M. Al-Barhamtoshy, Sherif M. Abdou and Abdullah M. Moussa)

  1. Efficient Query Specific DTW Distance for Document Retrieval with Unlimited Vocabulary

(Gattigorla Nagendar, Viresh Ranjan, Gaurav Harit and C. V. Jawahar)

  1. Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition Using Layer-Wise Training of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Adaptive Gradient Methods

(Mahesh Jangid and Sumit Srivastava)

  1. Benchmarking of Document Image Analysis Tasks for Palm Leaf Manuscripts from Southeast Asia

(Made Windu Antara Kesiman, Dona Valy, Jean-Christophe Burie, Erick Paulus, Mira Suryani, Setiawan Hadi, Michel Verleysen, Sophea Chhun and Jean-Marc Ogier)

  1. Transcription of Spanish Historical Handwritten Documents with Deep Neural Networks

(Emilio Granell, Edgard Chammas, Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Carlos-D. Martínez-Hinarejos, Chafic Mokbel and Bogdan-Ionuţ Cîrste)

  1. A Study of Different Classifier Combination Approaches for Handwritten Indic Script Recognition

(Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Pawan Kumar Singh, Ram Sarkar and Mita Nasipuri)

  1. DocCreator: A New Software for Creating Synthetic Ground-Truthed Document Images

(Nicholas Journet, Muriel Visani, Boris Mansencal, Kieu Van-Cuong and Antoine Billy)

  1. Open Datasets and Tools for Arabic Text Detection and Recognition in News Video Frames

(Oussama Zayene, Sameh Masmoudi Touj, Jean Hennebert, Rolf Ingold and Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara)

Ergina Kavallieratou, Guest Editor, MDPI Special Issue on Document Image Processing
( kavallieratou@aegean.gr )



The 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition was held in Niagara Falls, USA from August 5th through August 8th.

Over 130 people attended the conference, which combined a strong technical program, an attractive and comfortable meeting space with great food (the Niagara Falls Event and Convention Center), and the natural beauty of Niagara Falls. The banquet was held outdoors at the Old Fort Niagara, which was first used by the French military in the late 1600s.


ICFHR Banquet Photo.png
ICFHR 2018 Participants at Old Fort Niagara
(Photo credit: Angela Doll Photography)

There was also plenty of fun to be had, particularly around the falls. Pictures from the conference are available through flickr.

Technical Program. This was the first ICFHR to utilize a double-blind reviewing process, and we introduced ‘Birds-of-a-Feather’ talks, which were informal discussions on specific topics held during lunch, led by 1-2 session leaders. To our pleasant surprise, these informal meetings were so successful that the most common complaint was a lack of space at the tables where the discussions were held.

There were 125 paper submissions from 29 countries, of which 32 were accepted for Oral presentation (26%), and 65 were accepted for Poster presentation (52%). The acceptance rate was 97/125 = 78%. The number of submissions was comparable to previous ICFHRs. All papers received at least 2 reviews, with 105 of them (84%) receiving three or more reviews.

Some very interesting keynote talks were given by Kevin Knight and Gregory R. Crane, addressing handwriting recognition from the different perspectives of a leading Computer Scientist and a leader in the Digital Humanities.

The program is available online, along with posters and slides provided by some of the authors. The proceedings will be available through IEEE Xplore in the coming weeks.

Sponsorship. The conference secured both sponsorship and participation from leading companies creating handwriting recognition-based products (MyScript, Wiris, and Hyperscience), USC/ISI, and leaders in the broader computing space (Google and Apple). An industrial panel was held by David Doermann on the last day of the conference, exploring handwriting recognition technologies in industry, and common interests between academic and industrial researchers working with handwriting. Also, thanks to support from the IAPR, we were able to provide funds for the IAPR ICFHR 2018 Awards.

Awards. The IAPR ICFHR 2018 Award recipients were:

  • Best Paper (500 USD): Kenny Davila and Richard Zanibbi, for “Visual Search Engine for Handwritten and Typeset Math in Lecture Videos and LaTeX Notes”
  • Best Student Paper (300 USD): Eugen Rusakov, Leonard Rothacker, Hyunho Mo, and Gernot A. Fink, for “A Probabilistic Retrieval Model for Word Spotting based on Direct Attribute Prediction”
  • Best Poster (200 USD): Harald Scheidl, Stefan Fiel, and Robert Sablatnig, for “Word Beam Search: A Connectionist Temporal Classification Decoding Algorithm”

Our sincerest thanks to all the participants, Organizing Committee members, support staff and student volunteers for making ICFHR 2018 a great success. Hope to see many of you at ICFHR 2020 in Dortmund!

Richard Zanibbi, General Co-Chair, ICFHR 2018
( rxzvcs@rit.edu )



TC-11 maintains a colletion of datasets that can be found online in the TC-11 Datasets Repository.

If you have new datasets (e.g., from competitions) that you wish to share with the research community, please contact the TC-11 Dataset Curator (contact information is below).

Andreas Fischer (TC-11 Dataset Curator)
(andreas.fischer@unifr.ch)



Faculty Positions at the University of Michigan (USA)

Come work with us! The University of Michigan School of Information is hiring tenure-track faculty in multiple areas this year. We also have an outstanding Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship program that can serve as a fast track to assistant professor.

Please see the links below - for questions about any of these positions, please contact the chair of the faculty search committee, Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson (kevynct@umich.edu).

  • Tenure-track faculty positions in data science
  • Tenure-track faculty positions in digital curation and archival studies
  • Tenure-track faculty position in social media
  • U-M Presidential Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP)

General UMSI faculty job openings:

https://www.si.umich.edu/get-involved/faculty-job-openings

The University generally seeks applicants whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education. The program is particularly interested in scholars with the potential to bring to their research and undergraduate teaching the critical perspective that comes from their non-traditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education.

The mission of the School of Information is to create and share knowledge to help people use information – with technology – to build a better world. A successful candidate will be committed to, and will directly contribute to our goal of being the best research and teaching institution for the understanding and design of information and its technologies in service of people and society.

The School is home to vibrant research and teaching programs, with 50 FTE professors, and over 800 students. We offer four degrees: a Ph.D.; a Master of Science in Information; a Master of Health Informatics; and a Bachelor of Science in Information. In the fall of 2019 we expect to launch a new online degree: Master of Applied Data Science.

Founded in 1817, the University of Michigan has a long and distinguished history as one of the first public universities in the nation. It is one of only two public institutions consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten universities. The University has one of the largest health care complexes in the world and one of the best library systems in the United States. With more than $1 billion in research expenditures annually, the University has the second largest research expenditure among all universities in the nation. The University has an annual general fund budget of more than $2.1 billion and an endowment valued at more than $10.9 billion.

U-M EEO/AA Statement: The University of Michigan is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.



Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Chair of the Faculty Search Committee
( kevynct@umich.edu )

IRISA/INSA Rennes (France): Research Engineer/PostDoc Position (3 Years - repost)

Analysis systems for serial sources in collections of historical image documents

Pdf version:
https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/en/postdoc-eurhisfirm

Important Dates

September 1, 2018 - August 31, 2021  Contract period

IRISA - Intuidoc
IRISA is a joint research center for Informatics, including Robotics and Image and Signal Processing. 800 people, 40 teams, explore the world of digital sciences to find applications in healthcare, ecology-environment, cyber-security, transportation, multimedia, and industry. INSA Rennes is one of the 8 trustees of IRISA.

The Intuidoc team (https://www.irisa.fr/intuidoc) conducts research on the topic of document image recognition. Since many years, the team proposes a system, called DMOS-PI method, for document structure analysis of documents. This DMOS-PI method is used for document recognition, or field extraction in archive documents, handwritten contents damaged documents (musical scores, archives, newspapers, letters, electronic schema, etc.).

EURHISFIRM project
EURHISFIRM European project aims at developing a research infrastructure to connect, collect, collate, align, and share reliable long-run company-level data for Europe to enable researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to analyze, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth. To achieve this goal, EURHISFIRM develops innovative tools to spark a “Big data” revolution in the historical social sciences and to open access to cultural heritage.

EURHISFIRM is a project funded by the European Commission within the Infrastructure Development Program of Horizon 2020. The first phase of the Infrastructure Development Program lasts for three years. It aims at developing an in-depth design study of the Research Infrastructure. After this phase, Development and Consolidation Phases follow if further applications will be successful. EURHISFIRM brings together eleven research institutions in economics, history, information technologies and data science from seven European countries.

Position to be filled

  • Position: Post-doctoral fellow / Research Engineer
  • Time commitment: Full-time
  • Duration of the contract: up to 36 months, starting as soon a possible
  • Supervisors: Bertrand Coüasnon and Aurélie Lemaitre
  • Indicative salary: Up to €36 000 gross annual salary (according to experience), with social security benefits
  • Location: IRISA – Rennes, France

Missions
The post-doctoral fellow / research engineer will be working on two tasks of EURHISFIRM workflow: the architecture of an adaptable system for document recognition, and the implementation of a generic structure layout extraction module.

The scientific challenge will be to extract information from various printed serial sources. Due to the large variety of those documents, a flexible and easy-to-adapt document recognition system is designed. For that purpose, the system will be based on a modeling of knowledge not only at the page level but also at the collection level in interaction with experts of the historical sources. Thus, redundancies between pages will be used to make the system more reliable and reduce manual corrections while obtaining a high recognition quality.

The system will we based on the DMOS-PI method which gives a framework for the analysis of collections of documents. It enables to share information from the collection between the pages, thanks to an iterative mechanism of analysis. This mechanism also makes it possible to integrate an asynchronous interaction between automatic analysis and human operators in order to limit the time of interaction by avoiding mutual waiting.

This modeling of the global analysis must be able to adapt to very different kinds of documents: from very structured documents, like stock exchange lists with redundancy and strong consistency between sequences of data, up to less structured documents, like yearbooks even if, also for them, the sequence from one year to another is important for improving the recognition quality.

The implementation of a generic structure extraction module will be based on the DMOS-PI method. It uses a grammatical language, EPF (Enhanced Position Formalism), to describe a general page layout, with perceptive vision mechanisms, and an iterative analysis. The system will also combine structural method with Deep Learning. For new collections, an adapted description of the document layout will be developed. This has to be done on a large range of structure levels: from very structured pages like table structures from stock exchange lists, up to a paragraph-oriented structures from yearbooks.

Applicant Requirements

  • PhD, Master degree or Engineering degree in computer science
  • Experience in document recognition, statistical analysis or deep learning.
  • Fluent English
  • Skills in grammars and languages and/or logical programming are nice-to-have.

For further information, please contact Bertrand Coüasnon (bertrand.couasnon@irisa.fr) and Aurélie Lemaitre (aurelie.lemaitre@irisa.fr). Applicants should send a curriculum-vitae with a list of publications and the names and email addresses of up to three references.

Bertrand Coüasnon, Director, Media and Interactions Department (IRISA)
( couasnon@irisa.fr )

Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR - repost)

IAPR’s Industrial Liaison Committee is pleased to announce the opening of its Company Internship Brokerage List.

The web page lists internship opportunities for students at different levels of education and specialism. We expect many additional internship opportunities to be listed here as the community becomes more aware of the site.

IAPR Company Internship Brokerage List:

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

Bob Fisher, Chair, IAPR Industrial Liason Committee
( rbf@inf.ed.ac.uk )



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