Over the past two days I have been completely busy with the IMI Workshop on Computational Aesthetics and Photography held at NTU, Singapore organized by my Professor, Dr. Ramakrishna Kakarala. I had volunteered to assist the organizers in any possible way and I am happy to say that the event went on on smoothly.
The two days that I spent listening to prominent speakers was extremely knowledgeable. It all started off with Dr David G. Stork talking about “Computer Image Analysis Of Art”. First of all let me tell you that, I had spent the whole of my previous semester reading one of the books that he had co-authored, “Pattern Classification”. Each time I read it, I was astonished at how well it was written and also at the immense knowledge that I used to gain even with a small sitting. The book is written in such a way that it makes the reader think about the Pattern Classification techniques and makes them visualize the concepts. Its a ‘top-notch’ book and I would recommend every one of you in the field of engineering to read it. I respect the authors of this book . That said, you can imagine how it must have felt for me to sit about 4-5 feet from Dr. David G. Stork and listen to him talk about his research area and the specific details about the topic mentioned above. I was truly amazed by the expanse of Dr. David G. Stork’s research area.
The second talk was on “Affective Image Classification For Art Images” by Dr. Jana Machajdik. The reason I am mentioning this is that, I had worked closely on the same topic as a mini project in Computational Intelligence course during the first semester at NTU. I was surprised to see that the techniques she had made use of for the classification matched so closely to the ones that I had used in my Mini-Project. And, also the results were comparable (mine had more constraints attached to it though, considering it was for a mini project).
One other talk that I appreciated was the talk by Dr. Ron Kimmel, who spoke about “Metric Geometry In Action”. I was blown away by the immense knowledge that he possesses, not only in the topic that he spoke about, but also about a lot of other things which came to light over the two days by looking at the quality of questions that he posed to the other speakers.
Finally, I have to say that, these two days were very productive and informative. I got to know about the major research areas in the field of Computational Photography and most importantly, I was able to get to know who the experts were in this field. I am definitely looking forward to more such conferences.
vittalp 