Welcome to the Inaugural Annual General Meeting of PREMIA, 2004.

With two years of discussion and preparation, PREMIA is now officially formed. In August 2002, Prof. Rangachar Kastui, President of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR, www.iapr.org) approached researchers from Singapore with a suggestion of the formation of a member society under IAPR. He felt that there were already sufficient interests and active research in Singapore in the field of pattern recognition and AI-related work but Singapore was still not represented in IAPR. In December that same year, Prof. Sergey Ablameyko, Chairman of the IAPR membership committee further contacted a few people in the academia in Singapore to invite Singapore to join IAPR through the formation of a national society.

In the ensuing year, informal discussions were held among several staff members in NUS and NTU about the formation of such a society. Further contacts were made with people within the two universities as well as research institutes and the industry. The response was encouraging. An informal core group of people was formed and with some deliberation, it was decided that the Society be named Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association, with the acronym PREMIA.

It was also decided that PREMIA will be an association of scientists and engineers in Singapore who are interested in the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. Specifically, the topics of research interests include computer vision, image processing, speech analysis, robotics, multimedia, document analysis, character recognition, knowledge engineering, fractal analysis and intelligent control, statistical techniques, neural networks, evolutionary programming, fuzzy logic, machine learning and hardware implementation. The goal of PREMIA is thus to provide a forum for these professionals to get together for exchange of research ideas and to promote research collaboration. This will be done through seminars and dissemination of useful information among members as well as interaction with the industry. With this in mind, a constitution of PREMIA was drafted.

Meanwhile, the core group of people formed the Pro Tem Committee to proceed with the registration with the Registrar of Societies and to apply for admission into IAPR. The following are the office bearers in the Pro Tem Committee:

President: Tan Chew Lim (NUS)

Vice-President: Charles Graham Leedham (NTU)

Treasurer: Terence Sim (NUS)

Secretary: Ng Teck Khim (NUS/DSTA)

Committee Members:

Ma Kai-Kuang (NTU)

Shi Daming (NTU)

He Ji (NUS)

In February this year, PREMIA was officially registered with the Registrar of Societies, Singapore. A website at www.premia-sg.org was set up. Membership drive soon started. To date, we have 63 members, of whom, 37 are full members and the rest are student members. In April this year, PREMIA was also admitted as a member of IAPR. News on our admission to IAPR can be found in the latest issue of IAPR newsletter accessible to our members on the PREMIA's website. With our membership status in IAPR, all PREMIA's members will now enjoy registration discounts on all conferences organized by IAPR and its technical committees. The upcoming ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition) at Cambridge, UK, August 2004, is one example.

The Protem committee met twice so far and discussed various possible activities to be held in future. The first activity is the seminar talk today preceding the AGM, given by Prof. Lee Chin Hui, an eminent scientist in the field of Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence. Prof. Lee delivers his invited speech entitled "From Pattern Recognition to Information Intelligence", a topic that goes in line with the PREMIA's objective, on this important occasion of our inaugural AGM.

The AGM today will see the formation of the first official Board of PREMIA. We trust that the new Board will continue the same vision of the Pro Tem committee to organize more meaningful events and activities for the benefits of our members. We also urge all members, full members as well as student members, to play an active role together to promote PREMIA and make PREMIA a significant society in Singapore as well as internationally through its affiliation with IAPR.

Assoc. Prof. Tan Chew Lim

President of Protem Committee

Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA)

14 August 2004

Webmaster's Note: The agenda of the AGM, the PDF version of the president's report, as well as the PDF version of the treasurer's report are available in the PREMIA web site's download section.