There is some concern about scientific
conferences in general, and
signal/image/video conferences in particular, as money making machines (hence the
fees' concern anagram). Not only places where people meet, share, even copy or steal ideas... Remember the standard quote, attributed to
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933):
Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research
or maybe this quote has also been unfaithfully copied, since it often appear as
If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research
Steal or copy, two or many. Blame the the cut, correct and paste. Since Mizner's most famous plays is entitled
The Deep Purple, shouldn't this sentence be refined along the lines of another solid rock band,
Megadeth (
Captive honour, from
Countdown to extinction):
And when you kill a man, you're a murderer (plagiarist)
Kill many, and you're a conqueror (researcher, then)
Kill them all... Ooh... Oh you're a god!
What would be the research equivalent of "god"? Contributions welcome. Anyway, let us mention a few interesting conferences in signal or image processing. The upcoming
EUSIPCO 2008, in Lausanne, Switzerland, along with the satellite international workshop
LNLA 2008, dealing with "Local and Non-Local Approximation in Image Processing". Still waiting for the program and its novelties from the sparse or
compressive sensing world.
And now for something completely different. About 10 years ago, the department head of an engineering school asked me whether people in the industry did use
wavelets? My reply was: "do you teach wavelets to future engineers?" The answer was no. Anyway, there exists a conference dealing with wavelet applications in the industry, organized by Fred Truchetet and
Olivier Laligant:
SPIE Wavelet Applications in Industrial Processing VI (
WAIP 2009), along with
SPIE Electronic Imaging in San Jose, California, USA, 16-18/01/2009. Deadline for a short abstract: 16/06/2008.
My concern above was not about wavelets or anything else. But industrial business is often time consuming, cost bounded, and people tend to reuse known tools a lot. Even for weakly related problems. The quote here is the nail/hammer famous line. Though once again, several (digital) versions co-exist; one attributed to
Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), founder of humanistic psychology:
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail
or this one, copied from his book "Psychology of Science":
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail
Apparently, this idea is good enough to have been used by several persons. Maslow's is said to originate from his mentor
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), while
Bernard Baruch (1870-1965) is credited with
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
The only one i have been aware of before the world wide web was (in French)
Quand on n'a qu'un marteau dans sa boîte à outils, tous les problèmes ont la forme d'un clou
from a guy simply known as Juran. Which could be translated as:
When you only have a hammer in your toolbox, all your problems are nail-shaped
It might be
Joseph M. Juran (1904-2008, he just died on February
28th), management consultant, quality guru. All these folks overlap (in time) and exhibit some redundancy (in some orthogonal direction), which are my two main signal processing concerns. Anyway my reply was about teaching concepts that could help future engineers seize new ideas when needed, to avoid pure repetition.
Another conference is
GRESTI 2009 Symposium on Signal and Image Processing, to be held in Dijon, France, from 8 to 11 September 2009. Deadline 15 Feb. 2009. The last announcement for today is tentative, the
Mathematical Methods for Natural Images and Textures Processing, organized by G. Peyré, J.F. Aujol and J. Fadili, at
IHP, Paris, France, to be help in June 2009.
You may look at the 20th PIMRC 2009 call for papers. The submission dead-line is 06/03/2009 (03/06/09 American style, which looks arithmetically nicer but has ambiguities), and the conference is from 16/09/2009 to 18/09/2008. Topics follow:
