IAPR Techical Committee 3: Neural Networks and Machine Learning

The scope.

TC3 is one of the Technical Committees of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, IAPR. The scope of the Technical Committee 3 is not only neural networks, but also what is presently called Computational Intelligence, including at least artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing like genetic algorithms, and those branches of statistics that are relevant to the above fields. However, the emphasis is on classification problems rather than general function approximation etc., to make our profile different from and sharper than computational intelligence in general. Some excellent textbooks have recently appeared, highlighting the connections of neural nets with mainstream statistical classification methods.

Main activities.

Comparisons and benchmarking of classification methods, concentrating on machine learning and neural networks, is the main theme of the Committee. Comparison studies have been reported, especially on OCR, but they do not yet address the problems of a non-expert user working on an application and wanting some good results. He/she wants to know what classifier to use and how exactly to choose the various parameters, especially in neural network algorithms like back-prop. It has turned out that similar efforts are underway elsewhere, and contacts have been made. A reference list of available benchmarking databases and some test results are included below on this page. This list will be complemented by pointers to new ones when they become available.

Workshop activity is one of the main tasks of any TC. However, the field of artificial neural networks has grown very large and diverse, and there are so many neural network conferences annually all over the world, that it has been felt in the Committee that there is presently no significant market for a conference of our own. Good contacts to the program and organizing committees of the existing major conferences (like those organized by IEEE, INNS, and ENNS) are maintained by individual members of the TC3, and in this way the PR aspect can be strengthened in those meetings.

Membership.

The TC now has 26 members listed. The members are presently:

• Dr. Horst Bischof, Technical University of Vienna, Austria
• Prof. Vladimir Cherkassky, University of Minnesota, USA
• Prof. Robert Duin, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Prof. Robert Haralick, University of Washington, USA
• Prof. Georg Hartmann, Universitat-GH Paderborn, Germany
• Dr. Nathan Intrator, Tel Aviv University, Israel
• Prof. Anil Jain, Michigan State University, USA
• Prof. Michael I. Jordan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Dr. Martin Kraaijveld, Shell Research, The Netherlands
• Dr.. Jorma Laaksonen, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
• Dr. Yann LeCun, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, USA
• Dr. Borivoj Melichar, Technical University Prague, Czech Republic
• Prof. Fionn Murtagh, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
• Mr. Karl Nyberg, Grebyn Corporation, USA
• Prof. Hidemitsu Ogawa, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Prof. Erkki Oja, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
• Dr. Petra Perner, Institute of Computer Vision and Applied Computer Sciences, Germany
• Dr. Ravi Kumar Raju, Mysore, India
• Prof. Fabio Roli, University of Cagliari, Italy
• Dr. Tamas Sziranyi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
• Dr. Yaakov Stein, Efrat Future Technology Ltd., Israel
• Dr. Naftali Tishby, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
• Dr. Francesco Tortorella, Universita' degli Studi di Cassino, Cassino, Italy
• Prof. Ari Visa, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
• Prof. Harry Wechsler, George Mason University, USA
• Prof. Lei Xu, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

How to join the TC3?

Please send your name and address, including the email, to Ari Visa, ari.visa@cs.tut.fi.

Databases and Benchmarks

Below is a list of some public domain databases, classification benchmarks, and related information in the web:

Last modified: Fri Jun 16 10:59:18 EET 2000Mail to maintainer: ari.visa@cs.tut.fi