Westminster organises Institute of Electrical Engineers’ International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems

The four-day event was organised by Senior Lecturer of Computer Science and Mathematics at Westminster and Local Chair Dr Anastasia Angelopoulou. She was joined by the Chilean Association for Pattern Recognition (ACHiRP), a member of the Interational Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).  

Pattern recognition systems are computerised techniques for recognising and classifying patterns in data. To identify patterns and structures in various input formats, including text, speech and images, these systems utilise machine learning methods and algorithms. Pattern recognition is an important technique in many domains. Some of its applications include medical diagnosis, speech analysis and facial recognition.

The conference took place between 16-18 July and was opened by Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Westminster Professor Peter Bonfield, Dr Cesar Astudillo from Universidad de Talca, Chile, and Professor Sergio A Velastin from Queen Mary University of London and Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. They were joined by the Local Chairs, Dr Anastasia Angelopoulou and Professor Thierry Chaussalet, and four keynote speakers who presented on pattern recognition systems.

The conference consisted of 11 sessions which sparked a wide variety of debate on areas such as machine learning in medical applications, biometrics, image analysis, computer vision and real-time systems, AI techniques, natural language processing, principles of pattern recognition, data mining, big data and pattern recognition in agriculture. Each session involved around four to five talks on the papers written and submitted by many academics. The papers presented at the conference will now be published by the IEEE.

Four keynote speakers attended the event to host talks around the sessions. Professor Jan Peters from the Computer Science department in the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, spoke about inductive biases for robot reinforcement learning. Professor Shaogang Gong from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London discussed the idea of multimodal self-supervised learning. Professor Dima Damen from the University of Bristol’s Computer Science department highlighted opportunities in egocentric video understanding. Lastly, Professor Paolo Soda of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the University Campus Bio-Medico di Roma talked about resilient AI in healthcare.

Wednesday ended with a barbecue dinner and a prize ceremony where two awards were handed out. The Best Conference Paper was won by Leo Theoden from Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France, who wrote a paper titled Deep Learning-Based Instance Segmentation to Characterise the Morphology of Compact Aggregates through Image Analysis. The Best Student Paper was awarded to Hao Ren from Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Hao’s paper was titled Optimising Multi-Target Sessioning Through Airborne Passive Sensor Management.  

The day before the conference, Westminster also hosted two workshops at the Cavendish Innovation Space that explored generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reinforcement learning for image analysis. These workshops were delivered by Dr Ester Bonmati Coll, Dr Barbara Villarini and Iani Gayo, and have been accredited by The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Participants were given Certificates of Attendance counting as Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

The conference was endorsed by the IAPR and co-sponsored by four chapters of the IEEE UK & Ireland Section, Sensors Journal and the IET’s Vision and Imaging Technical Network.

The participants from various universities shared their thoughts on the event. Dr Leila Malekian said: “I wanted to use this opportunity to thank you and all the conference organisers for the great work. The event was exceptionally well-executed, and I gained valuable insights from the sessions and the workshops. Your hard work and dedication are greatly appreciated. I am also grateful for the help and support before and during the conference.”

Nodira Nazyrova said: “I wanted to thank you for organising this wonderful conference. The keynote speakers, workshops and research presentations were all very interesting and informative. I appreciate all the hard work and effort you put into making this event a success.”

Professor Boris Vintimilla added: “I very much appreciate the excellent organisation of ICPRS-2024 and the content of all the works presented throughout the week.”

Professor Rodrigo Salas added: “It was a great pleasure to know you, and I congratulate you for the great organisation of the event.”

Dr Anastasia Angelopoulou said: “We would like to thank Dr Saumya Reni, the IEEE Liaison Chair, our helpers and volunteers and Daniel Scroggins, the College Events Co-ordinator, and his team.”

This event directly contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and 17: Partnerships for Goals. Since 2019, the University of Westminster has used the SDGs holistically to frame strategic decisions to help students and colleagues fulfil their potential and contribute to a more sustainable, equitable and healthier society.

Learn more about the Computer Science BSc Honours course at the University of Westminster.