CIARP 2009

Yesterday, I arrived from Mexico. I attended to the CIARP conference to present the paper A Multi-class Kernel Alignment Method for Image Collection Summarization. The conference was really interesting, there were good works, contacts and tutorials.

I want to highlight in this blog four main things: feedback, related work, contacts and some photos :|.

Feedback
The oral presentation was fine ;). The time allocated was sufficient to convey the main ideas of the article. In the question's part I answered them satisfactory. I feel the work was interesting for the audience. Actually, the Director of CENATAV (Centro de Aplicaciones de Tecnologías de Avanzada) approached me at the end of my presentation, to invite Colombia belongs to the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IACR). I will describe it with more details in contact's section.

Related work
In the conference there were too many works related to image processing, some about robot vision, analysis of signal, video segmentation and tracking, computer vision and document processing. Here the conference proceedings.

With respect to my research, the following ones are the most relevant:

• A Brief Index for Proximity Searching. Eric Sadit Téllez et al.
  In this work, authors propose a method to quickly find similar objects in large databases. They propose to create an index structure and an algorithm based on permutations. Basically, they performs approximate search in metric spaces using the k nearest neighbor strategy.
• Automatic Choice of the Number of Nearest Neighbors in Locally Linear Embedding. Juliana Valencia-Aguirre et al.
  In this paper, authors propose to automatically find the number of nearest neighbors k in the computation of the LLE (Locally Linear Embedding) algorithm, a method for dimensionality reduction. The define a cost function that quantifies the quality of the embedding results. Normally, the k value is set manually in the algorithm which may cause that the results are not the best. They visually show how can be found this parameter and experiment with artificial and real-world data sets.
• Learning an Efficient Texture Model by Supervised Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction Methods. Elnaz Barshan et al.
  Authors investigate the problem of texture recognition under varying lighting and viewing conditions. They use textons [1], which describe local properties of textures. The high dimensionality of the textons and feature histograms make it necessary to find suitable methods in order to address the dimensionality reduction tasks, that is, methods that allow to guide algorithms making use of a priori information (unsupervised learning). Authors use a supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction method called CMVU (Colored Maximum Variance Unfolding) [2].

Other interesting works:

• Randomized Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis for Scene Recognition. Erik Rodner and Joachim Denzler.
• Dynamic Image Segmentation Method Using Hierarchical Clustering. Jorge Galbiati et al.
• A New Unsupervised Learning for Clustering Using Geometric Associative Memories. Benjamín Cruz et al.
• Simple Noise Robust Feature Vector Selection Method for Speaker Recognition. Gabriel Hernández et al.
• A Speed-Up Hierarchical Compact Clustering Algorithm for Dynamic Document Collections. Reynaldo Gil-García et al.
• A New Incremental Algorithm for Overlapped Clustering. Ariel Pérez Suárez.
• Improved Online Support Vector Machines Spam Filtering Using String Kernels. Ola Amayri and Nizar Bouguila.
  

Contacts

• José Ruiz Shulcloper. He is the Director of the CENETAV and member of the IAPR. He propose to me to involve Colombia as member of the IAPR, that is, to create the Colombian Society of Pattern Recognition. There are various countries in this association and he said to me that Colombia should be also member. The idea is to talk with professor Fabio about our interest in belonging to this association. If we are interested on, we have to write to José Ruiz and he will send to us what are the requirements.
• Hector Allende. He is president of the Chilean Society of Pattern Recognition and Director of the Doctorate Program at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM). He works in Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence. He said to us that he works in base ML research and supports other groups in applied research. I think that he is an importa
  
• Gabriel Hernández. Gabriel is a PhD student of the CENETAV. He is working on Pattern Recognition and presented an interesting work in the conference. His work is focused on Speaker Recognition.
  
• Carlos Martínez. Carlos is a PhD student at University of Exeter (UK). He works on the field of 2D and 3D image processing. The topic of his thesis is based on developing shape descriptors both for 2D and 3D shapes, and test their possible applications for image analysis, classification, and recognition.

Photos

Well, after an interesting conference it was necessary some of tourism. Here some photos of Teotihuacan:

Pyramid of the Sun
























The Pyramid of the Sun and the Avenue of the Dead from the Pyramid of the moon.












References

[1] Leung, T.K., Malik, J. Representing and recognizing the visual appearance of materials using three-dimensional textons. International Journal of Computer Vision 43(1), 29-44 (2001).

[2] Smola, A.J., Borgwardt, K.M., Song, L., Gretton, A. Colored maximum variance unfolding. In: NIPS (2007).