Francoise Fogelman Soulie - Böcker

The NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on Face Recognition: From Theory to Applications took place in Stirling, Scotland, UK, from June 23 through July 4, 1997. The meeting brought together 95 participants (including 18 invited lecturers) from 22 countries. The lecturers are leading researchers from academia, govemment, and industry from allover the world. The lecturers presented an encompassing view of face recognition, and identified trends for future developments and the means for implementing robust face recognition systems. The scientific programme consisted of invited lectures, three panels, and (oral and poster) presentations from students attending the AS!. As a result of lively interactions between the participants, the following topics emerged as major themes of the meeting: (i) human processing of face recognition and its relevance to forensic systems, (ii) face coding, (iii) connectionist methods and support vector machines (SVM), (iv) hybrid methods for face recognition, and (v) predictive learning and performance evaluation. The goals of the panels were to provide links among the lectures and to emphasis the themes of the meeting. The topics of the panels were: (i) How the human visual system processes faces, (ii) Issues in applying face recognition: data bases, evaluation and systems, and (iii) Classification issues involved in face recognition. The presentations made by students gave them an opportunity to receive feedback from the invited lecturers and suggestions for future work.

This volume contains the collected papers of the NATO Conference on Neurocomputing, held in Les Arcs in February 1989. For many of us, this conference was reminiscent of another NATO Conference, in 1985, on Disordered Systems [1], which was the first conference on neural nets to be held in France. To some of the participants that conference opened, in a way, the field of neurocomputing (somewhat exotic at that time!) and also allowed for many future fruitful contacts. Since then, the field of neurocomputing has very much evolved and its audience has increased so widely that meetings in the US have often gathered more than 2000 participants. However, the NATO workshops have a distinct atmosphere of free discussions and time for exchange, and so, in 1988, we decided to go for another session. This was an ~casion for me and some of the early birds of the 1985 conference to realize how much, and how little too, the field had matured.