Invited speakers

The 4th Mahasarakham International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence

December 9-10, 2010, Mahasarakham University, Mahasarakham, Thailand

Arun Agarwal (University of Hyderabad, India)

Document is any material that contains printed information conveying some meaning or a message. Document generally contains information about transactions like agreements, wills, ownership of properties etc. Being the legal evidence of transaction, it’s necessary to state the genuineness of a document. Questioned documents are those suspected of being fraudulent or whose source is unknown. For the questioned document whose authenticity is doubtful, it’s necessary to identify the source of the document. For assisting interpretation of evidence in courts, a new field of Document Forensics has emerged. Document Forensics thus deals with getting evidence from the questioned documents.

Some of the problems in document forensics are:

•Identification of handwriting and signatures

•Identification of a document as forgery

•Identification of typewriters, check writers, photocopies

•Detection of alterations, additions, deletions

•Deciphering obliterations, alterations, erasures

•Identification and deciphering of indented writing

•Comparison of inks and identification of type of writing instrument

•Printer Identification of the document

•Two documents are similar, i.e. printed using same technology

The problems listed above in Document Forensics have been projected as challenges in image processing application. The presentation discusses some of the above problems and suggests various image processing based approaches to address them. The presentation also devotes more on one of the recent contribution, namely Gaussian Variogram Model for printer classification.

Speaker biography: Arun Agarwal completed his B.Tech (Electrical Engineering) in 1979 and PhD (Computer Science) in 1989 both from IIT Delhi. He started his career as a Senior Research Assistant in IIT Delhi in 1979 and then joined University of Hyderabad in 1984, where at present he is a Professor and Head of Department of Computer/Information Sciences. At the University he is also the Director of Centre for Modelling Simulation and Design.

Professor Agarwal was a Visiting Scientist at The Robotics Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA and Research Associate at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He has also visited, Monash and Melbourne University in Australia; National Center for High Performance Computing, Hsinchu, Taiwan; Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; San Diego Supercomputing Centre USA; BioInformatics Institute in Singapore, Queensland, Australia; NECTEC, Thailand; NCSA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA; USM, Penang, Malaysia; KISTI, South Korea; IOIT, VAST, Hanoi, Vietnam etc.

He is on the Editorial Board of Editor, Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, International Journal of Pattern Recognition (RBCS); and Engineering Letters of International Association of Engineers. He is also a Fellow of IETE, Senior Member of IEEE, USA; Expert Member of AICTE to recognize new colleges to start engineering courses; Member of Board of Studies of several Universities. He was Chairman of IEEE Hyderabad Section for the years 2001 and 2002. He also received the IEEE Region 10 Outstanding Volunteer Award in 2009 in recognition of his dedications and contributions.

He has served on the technical program committee of numerous conferences in the area of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. He has served as committee chairs of a number of these conferences. He is also on the Steering Committee of PRAGMA, Member APGrid PMA. He is a member of GARUDA project, a national initiative on Grid Computing.

His areas of interest are in Computer Vision, Image Processing, Neural Networks and Grid Computing. He has guided 7 PhD thesis and more than 100 post-graduate dissertation and has published about 80 papers. He has several projects and consultancy in hand with several industry/research laboratories.

Anthony Cohn (University of Leeds, UK)

In this talk I will present ongoing work at Leeds on building models of video activity. I will present techniques, both supervised and unsupervised, for learning the spatio-temporal structure of tasks and events from video or other sensor data. In both cases, the representation will exploit qualitative spatio-temporal relations. A novel method for robustly transforming video data to qualitative relations will be presented. For supervised learning I will show how the supervisory burden can be reduced using what we term "deictic supervision", whilst in the unsupervised case I will present a method for learning the most likely interpretation of the training data. I will also show how objects can be "functionally categorised" according to their spatio-temporal behaviour and how the use of type information can help in the learning process, especially in the presence of noise. I will present results from several domains including a kitchen scenario and an aircraft apron.

Speaker biography: Tony Cohn holds a Personal Chair at the University of Leeds, where he is Professor of Automated Reasoning and served a term as Head of the School of Computing August 1999 – July 2004. He is presently Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems.

He holds BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Essex where he studied under Pat Hayes. He spent 10 years at the University of Warwick before moving to Leeds in 1990. He now leads a research group working on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with a particular focus on qualitative spatial/spatio-temporal reasoning, the best known being the well cited Region Connection Calculus (RCC). His current research interests range from theoretical work on spatial calculi and spatial ontologies, to cognitive vision, modelling spatial information in the hippocampus, and integrating utility data recording the location of underground assets. Many of the group’s publications concerning spatial reasoning can be found at www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/qsr/publications.html. He has received substantial funding from a variety of sources including EPSRC, the DTI, the European Union and various industrial sources. Work from the Cogvis project won the British Computer Society Machine Intelligence prize in 2004.

He has been Chairman/President of the UK AI Society SSAISB, the European Coordinating Committee on AI (ECCAI), KR inc, the IJCAI Board of Trustees and is Editor-in-Chief of the AAAI Press, Spatial Cognition and Computation, and Artificial Intelligence. He was elected a founding Fellow of ECCAI, and is also a Fellow of AAAI, AISB, the BCS, and the IET (formerly the IEE). He was Programme Chair of the European AI Conference ECAI’94, KR’98 and COSIT-05, Workshop Chair of IJCAI 1995, Conference Chair of KR 2000, IJCAI 2003. He was on the judging panel for the British Computer Society Distinguished Dissertation award. Recent invited/keynote talks include KSEM 2010, FLAIRS-10 (spatio-temporal track), CVWW-2010, Commonsense-2009, 21st Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - AI-08, PCAR-08, Cognitive Robotics’08, Spatial Reasoning and Communication/AISB'07. He has co-organised four Dagstuhl workshops, been on many programme committees for workshops and conferences, on the editorial board of DAKE, AI Communications (AICOM), and was Review Co-Editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence and on the Policy Committee of Electronic Transactions on AI (ETAI); he is currently on the editorial board of the Applied Ontology Journal, the Journal of Applied Logic. He is a member of the UK EPSRC Peer Review College and of the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), and has been a Director of KR Inc. since 2000. He was an area co-editor for the UK Government FORESIGHT Cognitive Systems project, and advised the FORESIGHT Intelligent Systems Infrastructure project. He has advised a number of overseas funding agencies, having been a member of two CNRS and three SFI programme review panels, a member of a DFG SFB review panel and an FCT panel, and chair of a programme review panel at NICTA. He has also been an expert reviewer at several EU project reviews.

Excitement of Research in Document Forensics

Learning about Activities and Objects from Video