[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 155 – May 2023

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Call for contributions: feel free to contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com

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1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2023

• Deadlines:
  • June 5, full paper submission deadline TPDL 2023
  • June 26, doctoral consortium application deadline ICDAR 2023
  • June 30, hosting proposal due ICDAR2026
    
• Events:
  • July 3-7, 2023, summer school SSDA 2023, Fribourg, Switzerland
  • August 21-23, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
  • August 24, doctoral consortium of ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
  • August 24, workshop GREC 2023, San José, California, USA

2024 and later

• Events:
  • September 2024, conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece

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2) ICDAR 2023: Call Doctoral Consortium

In 2011, the first Doctoral Consortium in the Document Analysis community was organized in conjunction with the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR). This has led to successful successor events at ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015, ICDAR 2017, ICDAR 2019, and ICDAR 2021. The tradition of having a Doctoral Consortium as a satelite event to the ICDAR main conference will further be continued at ICDAR 2023 in San José, California, USA.

The goal of the ICDAR 2023 Doctoral Consortium is to create an opportunity for PhD students to test their research ideas, present their current progress and future plans, and receive constructive criticism and insights related to their future work and career perspectives. A mentor (a senior researcher who is active in the field) will be assigned to each student to provide individual feedback. In addition, students will have the opportunity to present an overview of their research plan during a special poster session.

Participation in the ICDAR 2023 Doctoral Consortium will be limited to 25 students. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit their application by June 26, 2023. The Doctoral Consortium Chairs will then review all applications received. Preference will be given to students who are at a stage in their studies most likely to benefit (i.e., they have identified a research direction and published some initial results, but the thesis is not yet set in stone).

Participation to the Doctoral Consortium will be free for all accepted students. There will be no extra registration fees.

The ICDAR 2023 Doctoral Consortium will take place the day after the main conference, i.e., on Thursday, August 24.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Students willing to participate should submit an application in a SINGLE PDF file. The submission should be prepared using the instructions and style files for Springer computer science proceedings. The LaTeX template for LNCS can be downloaded here. It is also available on Overleaf.

The PDF file should contain the following information:

• Student’s name
• University
• Title of your thesis
• Supervisor of the thesis
• Starting and expected finalization date of the PhD
• Short research plan (1-2 pages about the work)
• Short CV (1-2 pages)

The research plan should contain an overview of the PhD topic, the steps made so far (including a list of publications), and the actions planned before finishing the PhD, especially novel research ideas to be pursued.

Submission should be done before June 26, 2023 to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcicdar2023

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline: June 26, 2023
• Acceptance notification and Mentor assignment: July 10, 2023
• Mentoring period: July 10 to August 24, 2023
• Doctoral consortium: August 24, 2023

We are looking forward to your participation!

Andreas Fischer and Veronica Romero, Doctoral Consortium Chairs, dc-chairs@icdar2023.org

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3) ICDAR 2023: Call for Nominations for the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award

Important Dates

Nominations Due:  April 30, 2023

The IAPR/ICDAR Award Program is an established program designed to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition in one or more of the following areas:

• Research
• Training of students
• Research/Industry interaction
• Service to the community

There are two awards categories, which have been presented together bi-annually in the past: The Young Investigator Award (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made) and the Outstanding Achievements Award. Because of the new yearly schedule of ICDAR, the two categories will alternate in odd and even years.

For ICDAR 2023, nominations are invited for the following award category:

IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award

The award will consist of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient will be invited to give the opening keynote speech at the ICDAR 2023 conference, introduced by the previous recipient of the award.

The nomination pack should include the following:

1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate.
2. Supporting letters (1 page each) from 3 active researchers from at least 3 different countries.

A nomination is usually put forward by a researcher (preferably from a different institution than the nominee) who is knowledgeable of the scientific achievements of the nominee, and who organizes letters of support.

The submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self-nominations are not allowed.

Please send nominations packs electronically to the TC10/11 chairs: Andreas Fischer andreas.fischer@hefr.ch and Jean-Christophe Burie jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr. The deadline for receiving nominations is April 30, 2023 but early submissions are strongly encouraged.

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4) Call for Hosting Proposals: ICDAR 2026

Deadline: June 30, 2023

Submission Method: Email to the TC10/11 chairs Andreas Fischer andreas.fischer@hefr.ch and Jean-Christophe Burie jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr

The International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) is the flagship event of TC10/11. It has been established as a bi-annual conference in 1991 and is now held annually, starting 2023. The aim of ICDAR is to bring together international experts to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all areas of Document Analysis and Recognition. The ICDAR Advisory Board is seeking proposals to host the 20th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held in 2026 (ICDAR 2026).

Any consortium interested in making a proposal to host an ICDAR should first familiarise themselves with the “Guidelines for Organizing and Bidding to Host ICDAR” document which is available on the TC10 and TC11 websites (https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr and http://www.iapr-tc11.org, respectively).

A link to the most current version of the guidelines appears below. Please check on the website of TC11 for the latest version.

Note that the current guidelines still refer to a bi-annual event. An updated version is coming soon that will reflect the change to an annual conference.

http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/images/ICDAR_Guidelines_2016_02_27.pdf

The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures outlined in that document.

The submitted proposal must define clearly the items specified in the guidelines (Section 5.2).

It has been the tradition that the location of ICDAR conferences follows a rotating schedule among different continents. Hence, proposals from the Americas are strongly encouraged. However, high quality bids from other locations, for example, from countries where we have had no ICDAR before, will also be considered. Proposals will be examined by the ICDAR Advisory Board.

Proposals should be emailed to the TC10/11 chairs Andreas Fischer andreas.fischer@hefr.ch and Jean-Christophe Burie jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr by June 30, 2023.

ICDAR Advisory Board,
Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11), Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10), Anna Esposito (Chair, IAPR C&M), C.V. Jawahar, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Koichi Kise

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5) GREC 2023 – repost

15th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC)

August 24, 2023
San Jose, USA - post conference workshop of ICDAR2023
http://grec2023.univ-lr.fr/

GREC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. Graphics Recognition is a sub-field of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, comics, musical scores, sketches, maps, architectural plans, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc.

The aim of this workshop is to maintain a very high level of interaction and creative discussions between participants, maintaining a “workshop” spirit, and not being tempted by a “mini-conference” model.

GREC 2023 will continue the tradition of past workshops held at the Penn State University (USA), Nancy (France), Jaipur (India), Kingston (Canada), Barcelona (Spain), Hong Kong (China), Curitiba (Brazil), La Rochelle (France), Seoul (Corea), Lehigh (USA), Nancy (France), Kyoto (Japan), Sydney (Australia) and Lausanne (Switzerland).

The workshop will comprise several sessions dedicated to specific topics related to graphics in document analysis and graphic recognition. For each session, there will be an invited presentation describing the state of the art and stating the open questions for the session’s topic, followed by a number of short presentations that will contribute by proposing solutions to some of the questions or presenting results of the speaker’s work. Each session will be concluded by a panel discussion.

Important dates

Abstract submission: April 17th, 2023
Full paper submission: April 24th, 2023 – 11:59PM Pacific Time Zone

Acceptance notification: May 24th, 2023
Camera ready due: May 31th, 2023

Workshop: August 24th, 2023

More information at: http://grec2023.univ-lr.fr/
Registration is open: https://icdar2023.org/registration/

General Chair: Jean-Christophe Burie
Program Co-Chair: Nathalie Girard, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, Samit Biswas

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6) 5th TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA 2023)

Website: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch
Dates: July 3-7, 2023
Location: Fribourg and Moléson-sur-Gruyères, Switzerland

Important Dates

May  4, 2023  Registration open
May 22 June 8, 2023  Application for financial assistance
Jun  5, 2023  End for Early bird registration
Jun 23, 2023  Registration closed 

We are pleased to announce that the 5th TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis and Recognition (SSDA), endorsed by TC-10 (Graphics Recognition) and TC-11 (Reading Systems), will be held in Switzerland from July 3 to 7, 2023.

SSDA 2023 continues the tradition of the past summer schools held in Jaipur (India) in 2017, La Rochelle (France) in 2018, Islamabad (Pakistan) in 2019, and Luleå (Sweden) in 2021.

A link for online registration will be available here on May 4, 2023. As it will be a in person event, the number of places is limited. First come, first served. We would like to welcome you all, but in case all the places are taken, a waiting list will be set up. Several grants are available for students, specifically for students coming from countries with low financial status. More information here. The deadline for submitting an application for financial support is May 22, 2023.

The scientific theme of the SSDA 2023 is Statistical and Structural Methods for Document Analysis. The theme highlights the importance of both statistical and structural pattern recognition approaches. The latter plays a central role for understanding not only the individual elements of a document but also their relations. With the advent of Transformers for sequence analysis and geometric deep learning for graph-based analysis, new perspectives are opening up in the field of structural deep learning. Topics of interest include document image processing, indexing and retrieval of documents, handwriting recognition, historical document analysis, document analysis for literature search, document summarization and translation, and document understanding, among others.

The SSDA is also a great occasion to get in touch with experienced researchers from the field of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR). The following invited speakers have already agreed to hold a lecture at the summer school (list is still subject to change):

• Apostolos Antonacopoulos, University of Salford, United Kingdom
• Jean-Christophe Burie, University of La Rochelle, France
• Véronique Eglin, INSA, France
• Gernot Fink, TU Dortmund University, Germany
• Andreas Fischer, University of Fribourg and University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland
• Alicia Fornès, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• C.V. Jawahar, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, India

Besides traditional lectures, a focus will be put on practical sessions, with a programming competition in document analysis. The summer school is also an opportunity to meet young and not so young researchers in the community. Therefore, participants are asked to prepare a short pitch and a poster about their research.

Two awards will be presented on the last day of the summer school: the Best Poster Award and the Excellence Award, both with a financial reward. The winner of the Excellence Award will be selected among the participants for their knowledge, collaboration ability, and their performance in the competition.

In addition, to create and reinforce interactions between participants, several social activities will be organized depending on the weather, such as a visit of an alpine cheese factory, a visit of the medieval town of Gruyère and its castle, and a panoramic walk up to 2000 meters of altitude to the summit of the Moléson mountain.

As Switzerland’s cost of living is expensive, in order to reduce the fees for students and to provide a stimulating work environment, the SSDA will be organized as follows: on the first and the last day (Monday and Friday), it will take place on the university campus in Fribourg. During the week (Monday evening until Friday morning), the summer school will be held in a chalet in the mountains near Fribourg. The registration fees are all-inclusives: scientific program, social activities, accommodation, all meals and coffee breaks.

Registration: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch/registration/

Contact: ssda2023@hefr.ch

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7) 1st Workshop on Automatically Domain-Adapted and Personalized Document Analysis (ADAPDA)

August 25, 2023
San Jose, USA - post conference workshop of ICDAR2023
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/adapdaicdar23

SCOPE

Document Analysis (DA) technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive in our daily life due to the digitalization of documents (both in the cultural and industrial domains) and the widespread use of paper tablets, pads, and smartphones to take notes and sign documents. In this respect, high-performing DA algorithms are needed that are able to deal with digitalized documents from different writers, in different languages (including ancient languages, modern slang terms, or writer-preferred abbreviations and symbols), and with different visual characteristics (due to the paper support and the writing tool), often very peculiar to the application domain. In this respect, domain adaptation and automatic personalization strategies are worth investigating to boost the performance of DA techniques in the scenarios mentioned above, which are of great cultural, practical, and economic interest. Nonetheless, in some application contexts, writer-specific data may contain sensitive information (either personal or business-related). In the sight of this, specific privacy-preserving solutions and lightweight adaptation strategies that can be performed onboard on personal devices must be considered when designing personalized DA techniques. This workshop aims at gathering expertise and novel ideas for personalized DA tasks such as, for example, Handwritten Text Recognition, Handwritten Text Generation, Writer Identification, Writer and Signature Verification, and Handwriting Analysis. In particular, it welcomes contributions on training and adaptation strategies of writer, language, and visual-specific models, new benchmarks, and data collection strategies to explore the mentioned tasks in a personalized setting, as well as related works on the personalized DA topic.

TOPICS

The workshop calls for submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

○ Adaptation for on-line Handwritten Text Recognition
○ Adaptation for off-line Handwritten Text Recognition
○ Adaptation for Handwritten Text Generation
○ Adaptation for Document Analysis System
○ Domain-specific text and symbol recognition
○ Adaptation for Human document interaction
○ Adaptation for Mobile text recognition
○ Domain-specific document analysis
○ Privacy-preserving domain adaptation of handwritten data
○ Writer, Language, and Visual adaptation of Document Analysis models
○ Novel benchmarks and datasets for personalized Document Analysis

IMPORTANT DATES

○ 20/05/2023 AoE: Paper submission deadline
○ 28/05/2023: Paper decisions to authors
○ 04/06/2023 AoE: Camera-ready deadline

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions should follow the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format and can be either:

○ Short papers in the range 2-6 pages (references excluded) 
○ Long papers in the range 6-12 pages (references excluded)

presenting on-going projects, datasets, final or preliminary results as well as innovative methodologies and tools.

You can submit your manuscript here: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ADAPDA2023 

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8) 27th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

Dates: 26-29 September 2023
Full paper deadline: 5 June 2023 - extended
Short paper deadline: 12 June 2023
Innovation paper: 12 June 2023
Website: https://tpdl2023.dei.unipd.it/index.html

The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) is a yearly date for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics. For over twenty-five years TPDL has been an international reference forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. TPDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries”, including new forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, and distributing digital content; and theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing. Digital libraries may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide.

Representatives from academia, government, industry, research communities, research infrastructures, and others are invited to participate in this annual conference. The conference draws from a broad and multidisciplinary array of research areas including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage and humanities, and scientific communities.

This year its focus is on bridging the wide field of Research and Information Science with the related field of Digital Libraries. Indeed, TPDL historically approached on “Digital libraries” embracing the field at large also comprehending three key areas of interest that can be synthesized as scholarly communication (e.g. research data, research software, digital experiments, digital libraries), e-science/computationally-intense research (e.g. scientific workflows, Virtual Research Environments, reproducibility) and library, archive and information science (e.g. governance, policies, open access, open science).

Contribution Types

Research Papers (up to 12 pages + unlimited references) present high-quality, original research of relevance to the TPDL community. Submissions should detail their methods and techniques sufficiently to enable replication and reuse. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented as long conference talks.

Practitioner Papers (up to 12 pages + unlimited references) present high-quality applied work of relevance to the TPDL community. Submissions should focus on results of direct relevance to practitioners and institutions in the TPDL community. Methods, tools, and techniques should be detailed sufficiently to enable application by other institutions. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented as long conference talks.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should detail their methods and techniques sufficiently to enable replication and reuse. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented as long conference talks. Papers must be in the Springer LNCS style. The review process is single-blind, so you can include the author names in the manuscript you submit.

Topics of Interest

Submissions are welcome concerning theory, architectures, data models, tools, services, infrastructures about the following topics (but not limited to):

Publishing science

•  FAIR data and software
•  Research objects
•  Nanopublications
•  Digital Preservation and Curation
•  Supporting Science Reproducibility
•  Metadata
•  Research Data Management
•  Research Output Management

Data

•  Data Search
•  Research Data Discovery
•  Data citation
•  Data and Information Lifecycle (creation, store, share, and reuse)
•  Data and Document Provenance
•  Linked Data and Open Data
•  Data Repositories and Archives
•  Data and Research Infrastructure
•  Data Stewardship
•  Data cleaning
•  Data Integration
•  Data curation

Discovering science

•  Information Retrieval
•  Recommendation systems
•  Document (Text) Analysis in support of discovery
•  Multimodal and Multilingual Data Access

Monitoring and assessment of science

•  Science of Science
•  Scientometrics and bibliometrics
•  Scholarly Communication Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge creation

•  AI / Machine Learning/ Data mining for DLs
•  Knowledge Bases
•  Entity Extraction and Linking
•  Ontology development

Digital Humanities

•  Digital Cultural Heritage
•  Digital Terminology
•  Computational Linguistics
•  Digital History
•  Digital Archeology
•  Knowledge Organization for Digital Humanities
•  Digital Research Methods on Cultural Heritage
•  Digital interfaces for Digital Humanities Research and Practice

Human-Computer Interaction

•  User Interface and Experience in Cultural Heritage Institutions
•  Information Interaction for Cultural Heritage Applications
•  User Participation and Experience
•  Information Visualization and Visual Analytics

More info: https://tpdl2023.dei.unipd.it/index.html

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9) IJDAR article alert (vol. 26, issue 2)

Volume 26, issue 2, June 2023. Please find below the titles of its 5 articles:

WriterINet: a multi-path deep CNN for offline text-independent writer identification
Chahi, A., El merabet, Y., Ruichek, Y. et al.

Retrieval-based language model adaptation for handwritten Chinese text recognition
Hu, S., Wang, Q., Huang, K. et al.

Tables to LaTeX: structure and content extraction from scientific tables
Kayal, P., Anand, M., Desai, H. et al.

Refocus attention span networks for handwriting line recognition
Hamdan, M., Chaudhary, H., Bali, A. et al.

Adaptive dewarping of severely warped camera-captured document images based on document map generation
Nachappa, C.H., Rani, N.S., Pati, P.B. et al.

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10) Job offers – 1 new

Post-doctoral position at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona

We are seeking one postdoctoral researcher to join the Vision, Language and Reading group at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), in Barcelona, Spain, focused on FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY.

The position is available for a minimum of 2 years and is linked to the “European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI” (ELSA), a European Project funded by Horizon Europe and backed by the ELLIS network of excellence. The project covers research topics that include robustness, privacy and human agency and will develop use cases in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, health and document intelligence.

CANDIDATE’S PROFILE

The candidate should possess a PhD in machine learning or computer vision and have a strong publication record. We are looking for candidates who have publications in top conferences like CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICDAR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR.

The candidate should have a strong background in machine learning and computer vision. Experience on document image analysis and/or visual question answering would be positive. The applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and independence. The candidate is expected to co-supervise PhD students.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project.

THE COMPUTER VISION CENTER

The selected candidate will work in the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), Barcelona, a research institute comprising more than 130 researchers and support staff, dedicated to computer vision research and knowledge transfer. With a strong international projection and links to the industry, the Computer Vision Centre offers an exciting environment for scientific career development. The Computer Vision Centre has a plan for expansion of its permanent research staff base and has received the “HR Excellence in Research” award as a provider and supporter of a stimulating and favourable working environment.

The direct responsible for these posts will Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, leading the Vision, Language and Reading research group at the CVC.

Barcelona is a vibrant city and an important Artificial Intelligence hub. The high quality of life is combined with an open and international looking character of the city. Barcelona is very well connected by air, sea and ground transportation. The region of Catalonia boosts its own AI strategy, in which the CVC is a key player.

RESEARCH CONTACT

If you are interested in the position, please contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas for more information and applications (dimos@cvc.uab.es)

APPLICATION PROCESS

Apply by filling in the online form at:
Computer Vision: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/
FL and DP: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/

MORE INFO

ELSA project: https://elsa-ai.eu/
Computer Vision Center: http://www.cvc.uab.es/
Vision, Language and Reading group: https://www.vlr.ai/