**PREMIA NEWSLETTER (ISSUE 4)** *Members' Spotlight: Dr. Terence Sim* Terence Sim is also known as Dr. Face among students and staff at NUS. His research interests revolve around both recognition and rendering of faces using pattern recognition techniques. From his both applied and practical work in faces, he has gained insight into biometrics for authentication using both fingerprint and facial recognition. His work in these areas has given him deep insights into the capabilities and weaknesses of biometric systems. Dr. Sim chairs the Workgroup on Cross-Jurisdictional and Societal Aspects of the Biometrics Technical Committee (part of the IT Standards Committee) which recommends industry standards for biometrics systems in Singapore. He also won the prestigeous 4th Temasek Young Investigator's Award in 2005. Dr. Sim obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, M.Sc from Stanford University, and S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Learn more about him and his research at: *PREMIA AGM* The Annual General Meeting (AGM) this year was held on 2 August at School of Computing, National University of Singapore. There were 29 members who attended the meeting including 4 newly-joined members. During the meeting, President Prof. Tan Chew Lim summarized the activities PREMIA has successfully organized in the year 2006/2007 and stated the future plans for the year 2007/2008. Treasurer Prof. Andrzej Sluzek also presented the summary of the account for the period from 8 August 2006 to 1 August 2007. In conjunction with the AGM, we also had a seminar talk entitled High Impact Public Speaking given by Mr. Mathew Linus, lecturer with NUS Business school. It turned out to be a very successful seminar which attracted a large audience and received good feedbacks. *PREMIA's Sponsorship of PRIB 2007 Student Scholarships* PREMIA has provided travel grant sponsorship to selected student participants of the 2nd IAPR International Workshop on Pattern Recogntion in Bioinformatics (PRIB 2007) held at Grand Plaza Park Hotel, Singapore, 1-2 October 2007. *PREMIA seminars* In July we had a seminar conducted by Hari Sundaram from Arizona State University on Media Semantics. Dr Sundaram discussed what the future of media search might be like and emphasized the movement of research away from object detection ( e.g., is there a face in this picture) to event detection (e.g., is this video of a wedding). Slides from his though-provoking talk are archived on PREMIA's website here: We will be holding another seminar in a few month's time on exciting real-world topics. Look for details in future emails from PREMIA. *premia-sg.org news* Thanks to your feedback from the AGM, we have incorporated a forum on the premia-sg.org website. Here, you can talk about any pattern recognition problems you may be facing and ask the community to help. Members can also post their suggestions for events, tutorials or general feedback about PREMIA here. Note that you'll have to create a register separately to use the forum (but at least it's free). Try it out here: Also, thanks to your help, we now have more pointers to conferences and journals on the web. We hope you continue to contribute and share your useful resources with other PREMIA members here. Web links Submit new link: (currently available only to registered members) *Upcoming Asia/Pacific Rim IAPR conferences and events* Call for attendance: [PReMi 07]: Dec 2007 India - 2nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence. Call for papers: [DAS 2008] September 2008 Japan - 8th International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems. Deadline for Papers: 1 March 2008. A full list of conferences is available directly from the IAPR website at: *IAPR newsletter* Get the latest issue from PREMIA website or IAPR website , or use the links below to get the newsletters directly from the premia-sg.org website: April 2007: July 2007: *PREMIA Members' benefits* Join PREMIA, a chapter of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) . Benefits of PREMIA membership include: - All the benefits of IAPR membership, including the quarterly IAPR e- Newsletter, and a 10% discount in registration fees for all IAPR conferences and workshops . - PREMIA Members enjoy discounted or free attendance at local PREMIA events, including industry outreach activities, focused seminars, conferences, courses, or lectures. ... among other privileges. If you are not a PREMIA member yet, come join us at If you would like to share your new research work with PREMIA members, please email to kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg .