**PREMIA NEWSLETTER (ISSUE 6)** *Members' Spotlight: Dr. Ng Hsiao Piau* Dr. Ng Hsiao Piau is presently a Research Fellow at Biomedical Imaging Lab, Singapore Bioimaging Consortium, A*STAR. He received his Ph.D. degree from NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering in 2008. Prior to that, he received his B.Eng. (Hons.) degree in Electrical Engineering from National University of Singapore in June 2004. During his B. Eng. candidature, he was a recipient of the Ngee Ann Kongsi Tertiary Scholarship. In August 2004, he began his Ph.D. candidature under an A*STAR Graduate Scholarship, and was conferred the Ph.D. degree in June 2008. His main research interests are in medical image analysis and applications of image processing. During his Ph.D. candidature, he performed research work in the area of orthodontics, participated in magnetic resonance (MR) data acquisition process and carried out analysis on the human masticatory muscles using MRI data. Upon embarking on his career at SBIC, he applied his expertise to neuroimaging and has actively been involved in research work with clinicians and fellow researchers. He is the co-organizer of a workshop funded by A*STAR CCO which has the vision of bridging research work between BMRC and SERC. To date, he has published 9 papers in international journals and 11 articles in conference proceedings. He received an Outstanding Paper Award at the 12th International Conference on Biomedical Engineering in 2005 and was a recipient of the PREMIA Travel Grant in 2006. *PREMIA AGM* The Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2008 held on 27 August at the Civil Service Club, Tessensohn Road. 26 PREMIA full members and 17 student members attended the meeting. During the meeting, President Prof. Tan Chew Lim summarized the activities PREMIA has successfully organized in the year 2007/2008 and stated the future plans for the year 2008/2009. Treasurer Prof. Andrzej Sluzek also presented the summary of the account for the period from 8 August 2007 to 1 August 2008. An election was conducted. Dr. Guan Cuntai was elected as President and Professor Tan Chew Lim as Vice-President. The following members were elected to the remaining positions of the Board: Prof. Chan Kap Luk, Prof. Andrzej Sluzek, Dr. Lee Hwee Kuan, Dr. Jimmy Liu, Dr. Terence Sim, and Dr. Shi Daming. In conjunction with the AGM, we also had a seminar talk on Python by Mr. Mervin Beng, the director of Republic Polytechnic¡¯s School of Information and Communications Technology (SIT). Mr. Pham Minh-Tri, a graduating PhD student from NTU was invited to do a short demo on face detection using Python to demonstrate the features of Python for pattern recognition research. *PREMIA Committee Board 2008~2010* The new PREMIA board was elected at the AGM: President: Dr. Guan Cuntai Vice-President: Prof. Tan Chew Lim Secretary: Dr. Lee Hwee Kuan Treasurer: Dr. Shi Daming Publicity & Courses: Prof. Chan Kap Luk Publicity & Courses (Assisting): Dr. Jimmy Liu Membership: Dr. Terence Sim Student Affair: Prof. Andrzej Sluzek Dr. Guan Cuntai is a Senior Scientist and Program Manager at Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Southeast University in 1993. His current research interests include brain-computer interface, neural signal processing, machine learning, pattern classification, and statistical signal processing. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He has been a reviewer for numerous premier journals, and a TPC member or chair of numerous international conferences. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. Prof. Tan Chew Lim is a Professor in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. He received his B.Sc. (Hons) degree in physics in 1971 from University of Singapore, his M.Sc. degree in radiation studies in 1973 from University of Surrey, UK, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1986 from University of Virginia, U.S.A. His research interests include document image analysis, text processing, neural networks and genetic programming. He has published over 300 papers in these areas. He is a member of the Governing Board of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is also a senior member of IEEE. Dr. Lee Hwee Kuan is the group leader of the Computer Vision and Pattern Discovery Group in Bioinformatics Institute. His current research work involves developing computer vision algorithms for bioimaging. Hwee Kuan obtained his Ph.D. in 2001 in Theoretical Physics from Carnegie Mellon University. He then held a joint postdoctoral position with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) and University of Georgia where he worked on developing advanced Monte Carlo methods and nano-magnetism. In 2003, with an award from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science, Hwee Kuan moved to Tokyo Metropolitan University. In 2005 he returned home to join Data Storage Institute, investigating novel recording methods. In 2006, he joined Bioinformatics Institute as a group leader. Dr. Shi Daming obtained his first PhD in mechatronics engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in China, and his second PhD in computer science from University of Southampton (So'ton) in United Kingdom. Dr Shi has been serving as an Assistant Professor in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) since 2002. He is the Deputy Director of Centre for Computational Intelligence, School of Computer Engineering, NTU. He has held guest professor appointment from Harbin Engineering University in China, and visiting professor appointment from International University in Germany. Dr. Shi is a senior member of the IEEE, chairing the technical committee on Intelligent Internet Systems, IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. A/Prof. Chan Kap Luk obtained his PhD degree in Robot Vision from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London, U.K. in 1991. He is now an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are in image analysis and computer vision, particularly in texture analysis, statistical image analysis, perceptual grouping, image and video retrieval, application of machine learning in computer vision, computer vision for human computer interaction, and biomedical signal and image analysis. He is a member of the IEEE and IET. Dr. Jimmy Liu is a Research Scientist and the group leader of Feature and Segmentation Group in Computer Vision & Image Understanding Department, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). Jimmy started his career as a software programmer in 1980s. After designing IT systems for a few years, Jimmy joined a Singapore local company, where he headed the R&D activities for 8 years. Following his interest, Jimmy returned to academia in 2002 and devoted full attention to medical imaging research and specialized in Medical image processing ever since. Dr. Terence Sim is an Asst. Prof. at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. He teaches an undergraduate course in computer vision, and a graduate course in movie special effects. His research includes: face recognition, multimodal biometrics, and computational photography. He also dabbles in some aspects of music processing, such as polyphonic music transcription. Dr. Sim serves as the Chairman of the Cross-Jurisdictional and Societal Aspects Working Group (WG6) of the Biometrics Technical Committee, Singapore. The interesting issues here are the legal and privacy aspects of using biometrics. A/Prof Andrzej Sluzek is currently in the School of Computer Enginnering since 1992. As a concurrent appointment, he has been a deputy director of the Robotics Research Centre of NTU since 1994. He received his Master, Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from the Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) where he worked for several years. Before joining NTU, he was also a visiting fellow at the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India) and a research fellow at the Univeristy of Birmingham (UK). His research interests are machine vision, intelligent robotics, and digital systems. His recent research works focus on visual information retrieval using machine vision techniques, implementation of vision-based sensory devices and gated imaging systems. *PREMIA Sponsership for ICPR Student Travel Grant* We offered five grants of S$500 each to assist student members of PREMIA to attend The 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR2008) which will be held 8-11 December 2008 in Tampa, Florida, USA. The five student travel grant recipients are: Li Linlin (NUS/SOC), Ye Ning (NUS/SOC), Sriganesh Maniganahalli Srihari (NUS/SOC), Omid Dehzangi (NTU/SCE), and Tan Guoxian (NTU/COE). *PREMIA seminars* We recently held the following seminars jointly with NUS, NTU or IEEE Singapore Chapter: 1. Data Modeling Using Kernels and Information Theoretic Learning, by Prof. Jose C. Principe, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Florida, Gainesville. (12 Mar 2008) 2. Kernel-based Class Separability: Theory and Applications, by Dr Lei Wang, RSISE, Australian National University. (20 Jun 2008) 3. Real-Time Document Image Retrieval with LLAH, by Prof. Koichi Kise, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan. (18 Jul 2008) 4. Large-Scale and Real-Time Specific Object Recognition, by Prof. Koichi Kise, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan. (18 Jul 2008) 5. Pattern recognition with supplementary information -- an overview and recent results, by Dr. Masakazu Iwamura, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan. (18 Jul 2008) 6. Document Image Compression and Compressed Domain Document Processing, by Dr. Utpal Garain, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. (25 Jul 2008) 7. Sensitivity Based Generalization Error for Supervised Learning Problem with Applications in Model Selection and Feature Selection, by Prof. Daniel S Yeung, Machine Learning and Cybernetics Research Institute, President of IEEE SMC Society. (14 Oct 2008) 8. Multimedia Information Security: An Overview of Research and Challenges, by Prof. Philip Chen, University of Texas at San Antonio. (15 Oct 2008) 9. Statistical Analysis of NeuroImages, by Prof. Heng Pheng Ann, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. (3 Nov 2008) 10. On Cardiac Signal analysis, by Prof. Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. (21 Nov 2008) 11. Proactive Computing Research at u-Lifecare Research Center in Korea, by Associate Professor Tae-Seong Kim, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea. (4 Dec 2008) *Upcoming Asia/Pacific Rim IAPR conferences and events* Call for participation: [MVA 09]: 20-22 May 2009 Yokohama - IAPR Conference on Machine Vision Applications. A full list of conferences is available directly from the IAPR website at: http://www.iapr.org/conferences *IAPR newsletter* Get the latest issue from PREMIA website http://www.premia-sg.org or IAPR website http://www.iapr.org/Newsletter06-02/, or use the links below to get the newsletters directly from PREMIA website: April 2008: http://www.premia-sg.org/newsletter/Newsletter08-02.pdf July 2008: http://www.premia-sg.org/newsletter/Newsletter08-03.pdf October 2008: http://www.premia-sg.org/newsletter/Newsletter08-04.pdf *PREMIA Members' benefits* Join PREMIA, a chapter of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) http://www.iapr.org/ . 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 http://www.iapr.org/conferences/ . - PREMIA Members enjoy discounted or free attendance at local PREMIA events, including industry outreach activities, focused seminars, conferences, courses, or lectures. If you are not a PREMIA member yet, come join us at http://www.premia-sg.org/content/view/9/55/. If you would like to share your new research work with PREMIA members, please email to Dr. Terence Sim (tsim@comp.nus.edu.sg).