Report from ICMMI'13
The ICMMI 2013 Conference was held in a lovely village situated in the Beskidy mountain range. The chosen hotel offers a high standard of apartments as well as SPA and Wellness treatment. During the conference 72 attendees from 10 countries had the opportunity to share their knowledge and research experience. The scientific atmosphere was accompanied by beautiful autumnal weather and colours.
The conference was enriched by lectures given by high-class specialist researchers (four keynote speakers and one invited speaker).
Tuesday, October 22th, 2013
The registration desk of the conference was opened at noon on Tuesday. The majority of the attendees arrived before lunch. As it was a sunny day they had the opportunity to have a walk and to enjoy the views of the surrounding area.
The conference was officially opened after lunch by Prof. Tadeusz Czachórski, who welcomed all the participants and asked Prof. Edwin R. Hancock (Department of Computer Science, University of York, United Kingdom) to give the first keynote lecture entitled Pattern Recognition with Non-Euclidean Similarities.
After an interesting discussion summarizing the lecture, the first regular session on Human – Computer Interactions started, which was followed, after a coffee break, by another interesting lecture conducted by Prof. Evsey Morozov (the Institute of Applied Mathematical Research, the Russian Academy of Sciences). The issue discussed was: Stability analysis of regenerative queues: recent results.
At the end of that extremely interesting day, the second regular session concerning Speech Processing and Analysis took place.
In the evening all participants were invited to a Barbecue Dinner with live Folk Music. The chilly night was warmed by the great atmosphere and heat from the bonfire.
Wednesday, October 23th, 2013
On the second day of the conference the participants were greeted with lovely weather. After breakfast they had the opportunity to listen to the next exciting keynote lecture entitled Visualization & Data Mining for High Dimensional Datasets given by Prof. Alfred Inselberg (Tel Aviv University). The lecturer rewarded all the participants taking part in the discussion with sweets
After the highly interesting presentation, two regular sessions on Bio-Data Mining and Discovery and Data Storage and Transfer were held, with two coffee breaks.
Conference Trip
The weather was delightful for the day of the trip. After lunch the participants had the chance to join the Conference Trip to the Żywiec Brewery Museum or to spend time in the mountains. The Żywiec Brewery Museum is the biggest establishment of its kind in Poland. Our guests learnt much about the Brewery’s history and at the end of the visit had the chance to taste local beer.
In the evening some of the papers were discussed in the form of a Poster Session. After the formal part of the session ended, many attendees stayed in the conference room, and spent the evening enjoying snacks, drinks and lively conversation.
Thursday, October 24th, 2013
Thursday morning was not as warm and sunny as the previous ones. Fortunately the exciting keynote lecture entitled Case-Based Reasoning and the Statistical Challenges was planned. Thanks to Prof. Dr Petra Perner (Institute of Computer Vision and Applied Computer Sciences, Germany) and her presentation, the participants forgot about the unfavorable weather. Such an atmosphere extended to the next regular session on Image and Sound Processing but the attendees finally had to face the weather and take part in the conference photo.
After that the conference continued with three regular sessions: Expert Systems and Decision Support, Fuzzy Systems and Signal Processing and Computational Intelligence and Pattern Recognition.
The banquet
At the end of that long day the conference banquet was held. During the formal part of the reception Prof. Adam Czornik (Dean of Automation Control, Electronics and Computer Science Department of Silesian University of Technology) together with the Chair of the ICMMI 2013 Organization Committee Aleksandra Gruca announced the recipients of the Best Paper Award and Best Poster Award. The Best Paper award, sponsored by the Dean, for the paper Evolutionary Computation for Design of Preprocessing Filters in QRS Detection Algorithm was handed to Krzysztof Walczak. The prize was Best Poster presented to Joanna Żyła for the poster Investigation for Genetic Signature of Radiosensitivity-Data Analysis.
This pleasant occasion was a warm-up to the banquet’s entertainment. The most persevering participants left the banquet room early on the Friday morning.
Friday, October 25th, 2013
The sun returned to the sky to accompany the attendees during the last conference day, which like other conference days started with a very interesting keynote lecture entitled Robust Adaptive Predictive Modeling and Data Deluge given by Prof. Bogdan Gabrys (Smart Technology Research Centre, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom). His stimulating talk began a series of presentations divided into two regular sessions: Robot Control and Navigation and Cognitive Systems and Algorithms and Optimisation.
The latter session was the last one and unfortunately it was time to end the ICMMI 2013 conference. All attendees gathered for the official closing ceremony. At the beginning the Best Presentation prizes were announced. The winner of the Best Presentation award was Adam Schmidt for the presentation Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with Direct Orientation Change Measurements. Krzysztof Szklanny was awarded with a honourable mention diploma for the presentation Multimodal Speech Synthesis For Polish Language.
The Chair of the ICMMI 2013 Organization Committee Aleksandra Gruca thanked all keynote speakers for their exciting lectures and all conference attendees for making conference sessions so interesting and for creating a great atmosphere during all the proceedings.
This atmosphere and the high level of presented research undoubtedly will give us hope for a successful meeting of all the participants and new attendees at the next International Conference Man Machine Interaction.
Credits:
Text by Katarzyna Harężlak and Aleksandra Gruca
Photos by Agnieszka Brachman and Aleksandra Gruca