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In the recent Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology held at Georgia Tech, high school seniors Ziyuan Liu and Cassee Cain took first place in the regional championship. Their project used the Xbox Kinect and computer vision to analyze human gait. The Oak Ridge High School seniors will advance to the national competition on Dec. 2-5 in Washington D.C., where they will compete for a $100,000 scholarship. More information is available in a Knoxnews article.

College undergraduates and high schoolers are now offered new oppotunities to learn about computer vision through a series of summer programs. This year, five separate programs are offered:

• The National Science Foundation’s REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates)
• Research Experience for Teachers supplement;
• Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) and
• Computational Science Training for Undergraduates in the Mathematical Sciences (CSUMS),
• Army Research Office’s Apprenticeship program.

A press release from University of Central Florida (UCF) describes one of these summer programs to expose high school students to computer vision.

In addition, Montclair State University offers a REU program in image processing and computer vision. The program is led by Prof Stefan Robila. More information is available at the iMagine website.

The Fifth ACM/IEEE International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras (ICSDC 2011) is now accepting proposals for the demo session. Researchers and industry-based developers are invited to demonstrate and present their latest results. Written material can be submitted as a two-page demo paper that will be published. Furthermore, ICDSC 2011 will feature a PhD Forum where students present and defend their research topics and receive feedback from an academic jury. Two-page PhD Forum submissions will be published as well. The deadline for submission is June 19, 2011.

More information is available in the ICDSC 2011 website.

CVPR 2011 will hold a Doctoral Consortium June 20th for senior Ph.D. students to present their research and their career objectives to a committee and receive constructive feedback. It is not necessary to have a paper appear at CVPR 2011 to participate. Approximately 30 students will be selected. Details are available at: cvpr2011.org/DoctoralConsortium.

Dylan Dalrymple, a high school student from Pensacola, Florida, has won the Grand Award in physical science in the recent Florida State Science Fair Competition. His project is a stereo vision robot with algorithms to convert the image data into a 3D map. More information is available from a pnj.com article.

7th INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON PATTERN RECOGNITION (ISSPR)
4-9 SEPTEMBER 2011, Plymouth, UK

http://pro.expressemail.in/link.php?M=1050327&N=1516&L=707&F=T

Early registration deadline: 22 April, 2011

It is a pleasure to announce the Call for Participation to the 6th International Summer School on Pattern Recognition. I write to invite you, your colleagues, and students within your department to attend this event. In 2010, the 6th ISSPR School held at Plymouth was a major success with over 90 participants. The major focus of 2011 summer school includes:

- A broad coverage of pattern recognition areas which will be taught in a tutorial style over five days by leading experts. The areas covered include statistical pattern recognition, Bayesian techniques, non-parametric and neural network approaches including Kernel methods, String matching, Evolutionary computation, Classifiers, Decision trees, Feature selection and Dimensionality reduction, Clustering, Reinforcement learning, and Markov models. For more details visit the event website.

- A number of prizes sponsored by Microsoft and Springer for best research demonstrated by participants and judged by a panel of experts. The prizes will be presented to the winners by Prof. Chris Bishop from Microsoft Research.

A cognitive robotics lab has been established at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York. In cognitive robotics, robots are used to test models of perception and cognition in the real world. Says RPI Professor Vladislav Daniel Veksler: “The real world has a lot of inconsistency that humans handle almost without noticing — for example, we walk on uneven terrain, we see in shifting light. With robots, we can see the problems humans face when navigating their environment.” All RPI students may use the lab. More information is available in a press release.

Students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich (ETH-Zurich) have built an autonomous flying microrobot helicopter using open source software. The Pixhawk robot's vision system currently runs onboard the vehicle and tracks markers on the floor to navigate. The onboard computer vision has only a 30 ms latency and consumes only 10% of the computing resources. The computer vision system was demonstrated at ECCV 2010 (first video below). The second video shows the robot's autonomous navigation performance at IMAV 2010.

On-Board Computer Vision Demo (ECCV 2010):

Autonomous Navigation Demo (IMAV 2010):

Physorg reports that Arturo Flores, a student at the University of California, San Diego, has built a computer vision system that removes pedestrians from Google Street View images. Mr. Flores' system used existing detection software to locate pedestrians and replaced their pixels with pixels of the corresponding background taken from other images. The technique works best when the backgrounds are planar. The project was done for a computer vision course taught by Professor Serge Belongie and has been published in the IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Vision.

OpenCV (The Open Source Computer Vision Library) has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code 2010 program. Potential topics of interest for student projects include, among others, augmented reality, photo stitching, motion analysis, GUI, parallelization, and implementing OpenCV on new platforms such as 64-bit OSX and Android. For more info, see Willow Garage's Summer of Code mentorship page for the OpenCV project.