Hong Kong Hosts 2014 SIAG/IS Conference
By Hongyu Liu and Michael Ng
The 2014 SIAM Conference on Imaging Science, held at Hong Kong Baptist University, May 12-14, drew approximately 580 scientists from all over the world, including 168 students. Sponsored by the SIAM Activity Group on Imaging Science, the biennial conference gives those working in the field a forum for exchanging research results and addressing open issues in all aspects of imaging science. Barbara Kaltenbacher (University of Klagenfurt, Austria), Michael Ng (Hong Kong Baptist University, China), and Fadil Santosa (University of Minnesota, USA) co-chaired the organizing committee for what was the first conference of a SIAM Activity Group held in Asia.
The program featured six plenary speakers: Antonin Chambolle, Ecole Polytechnique, France; Michael Elad, Technion, Israel; Leo Grady, HeartFlow, USA; Yi Ma, ShanghaiTech University, China; Carola-Bibiane Schölieb, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; and Rebecca Willett, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA (see article based on the talk: "The Dark Side of Image Reconstruction: Emerging Methods for Photon-limited Imaging"). Among the topics they discussed were convex representation, graphs in image processing, industrial imaging, low-rank structure in high-dimensional data, optimization models, and photon-limited imaging.
The SIAG/IS Prize was awarded to A.M. Bruckstein, D.L. Donoho, and M. Elad for their paper “From sparse solutions of systems of equations to sparse modeling of signals and images” (SIAM Review, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2009, pages 24–81). The authors were cited “for their fundamental contribution to the theory and practice of sparse representations and compressed sensing, and their popularization within the imaging science community.” Bruckstein gave the prize lecture at the conference.
The conference also honored Vicent Caselles, who died in August 2013, by awarding the Vicent Caselles Student Award to Vincent Duval (CEREMADE, France); the prize paper was titled “Fine properties of the TVL1 and the TV-G models: Geometry versus oscillations.” Eligibility for the prize was limited to candidates with doctoral degrees awarded between January 2010 and January 2014, for work related to contributions and areas of interest to Caselles (e.g., image and video processing, variational formulations, PDEs).
Sessions at the conference, which in addition to the plenary talks included a minitutorial, 60 minisymposia, 11 contributed sessions, and a poster session, considered the wide variety of mathematical, statistical, and computational methods used in imaging science; among them were transform and orthogonal series methods, nonlinear optimization, numerical linear algebra, integral equations, partial differential equations, Bayesian and other statistical inverse estimation methods, operator theory, differential geometry, information theory, interpolation and approximation, inverse problems, computer graphics and vision, and stochastic processes. The accompanying word cloud depicts the frequency of keywords in abstracts from all the sessions.
The conference concluded with a Chinese banquet at a traditional Cantonese restaurant, featuring a lion dance performance.
Hongyu Liu is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Hong Kong Baptist University. Michael Ng is the head and chair professor of the Department of Mathematics and the chair professor (affiliate) of the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University.