Computer Science prof helps lead international workshop

Dr. Reneta Barneva, a professor of computer science at SUNY Fredonia, is serving as vice chair of the International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis (IWCIA) 2008 to be held April 7-9 at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Buffalo. She and a colleague from Buffalo State College were designated to organize the event.

Image analysis is a scientific discipline that provides theoretical foundations and methods for solving problems that appear in a diverse range of areas, such as medicine, robotics, defense and security. The IWCIA workshop ranks as one of the most prominent research conferences in the broad area of visual computing, and the ratio of submitted and accepted research papers — the basis for selecting conference participants — is relatively low.

IWCIA workshops, which have been conducted for 18 years, are truly an international event. They have been held in France, Japan, Italy, New Zealand, Germany and the United States. This is the first time, however, that the workshop has been organized by scholars from universities which are generally classified as non-research centers.

The 2008 workshop received submissions from such highly regarded universities as Princeton, Harvard Medical School, UCLA, Georgia Tech, SUNY at Buffalo, SUNY at Stony Brook, and many others from around the world. Each submitted paper was subjected to a double-blind review by at least three members of the International Program Committee. Authors of the accepted papers will represent countries from four continents that include Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Hungary, India, Mexico and the United States, among others.

For the first time in the workshop’s history, a Nobel laureate, Dr. Herbert Hauptman, will deliver the opening address. Dr. Hauptman is president of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, a biomedical research facility in Buffalo.

A member of the SUNY Fredonia faculty since 2001, Dr. Barneva is recognized throughout the world as an expert in combinatorial image analysis, digital geometry, computer graphics and related areas of visual computing. She will also be presenting her work at the conference, as will Dr. Khalid Siddiqui, chair of Fredonia’s Department of Computer Science. Both Dr. Siddiqui and the department’s systems administrator, Michael Szocki, are also members of the workshop’s organizing committee.

In addition, Andrew Parker and Nathaniel Skinner – two of Dr. Barneva’s undergraduate students – have been invited to attend the event, and SUNY Fredonia President Dennis Hefner graciously agreed to sponsor their participation.

Best Student Paper Awards will be presented for the first time at the conference. President Hefner is sponsoring these awards, which will be given to two students by Dr. Virginia Horvath, Fredonia’s vice president of Academic Affairs.