Postcard from Albuquerque

In big corporations the hand often does not know where the foot is and then shoots itself in the foot. Now I am finally able to get at my email after my old mailbox was secretly deleted over two weeks before I got access to the new mailbox. There I found a postcard from Albuquerque I would like to share with you. It was sent by John McCann, who shot it on his HP PhotoSmart C945 camera and kindly gave permission to reproduce it in this post.

The crown jewels of learned societies are its Fellows. The Fellowship Award has three purposes: it recognizes individuals with a lifelong contribution to their field, it points out eminent examples for the young to look up to, and it ranks the conferring society by the quality of its Fellow members.

When a society evaluates members for the Fellowship Award, it has to ponder if their promotion increases the average quality of its Fellows compared to that of other societies. Roughly, two criteria are evaluated: the scientific quality of their research, and the structural impact they had in their field and society in general.

The three gentlemen in McCann's postcard from Albuquerque are freshly minted IS&T Fellows who scored particularly high in structural impact, while obtaining outstanding achievements in imaging. Let me introduce them from left to right, first with their citation then with their bio sketch:

Robert R. Buckley

for his contributions to gamut mapping, color encoding, document encoding, and their standardization

A Research Fellow at Xerox Research Center in Webster, NY, Dr. Robert Buckley began his career at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1981, after receiving a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT. He holds an MA in Psychology and Physiology from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick. During his career at Xerox, he has held research management and project leadership positions in color imaging and systems, and has worked on color printing, image processing, enterprise coherence, and standards for color documents and images.

Dr. Buckley pioneered gamut mapping and led the way in the use of uniform color spaces in the processing and coding of color images. He co-authored the first color encoding standard, invented the Mixed Raster Compression method, and co-invented object-optimized printing technology.

In the area of standards, Dr. Buckley influenced the color fax standard and was the lead author of the IETF standard file format for internet fax. He chaired the CIE Technical Committee on the Communication of Color and was project editor for Part 6 of the JPEG2000 standard. Dr. Buckley has lectured and consulted on the use of JPEG2000 in the cultural heritage community, designing the profile that the Library of Congress uses in the National Digital Newspaper Program.

Dr. Buckley has been active in the IS&T/SID Color Imaging Conference since its inception, serving on the Organizing Committee and co-chairing CIC in the second and twelfth year. More recently, he served as the founding co-chair of the new IS&T Archiving Conference for its first two years. He received the IS&T Service Award in 2005; in 2006, he became president of the Inter-Society Color Council and chaired the ISCC/CIE Symposium that celebrated the twin 75th Anniversaries of ISCC and the CIE Standard Observer.

Shoji Tominaga

for his contributions to color imaging science, particularly the interaction of light with materials, color constancy, and illuminant estimation

Shoji Tominaga was born in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan (1947) and received his BE, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Osaka University (1970, 1972, and 1975, respectively).

Since 2006 he has been professor in the Department of Information Science of the Graduate School of Advanced Integration Science at Chiba University in Japan. Prior to that he was with Electrotechnical Laboratory in Osaka (1975-1976) and Osaka Electro-Communication University (1976-2006). While at Osaka Electro-Communication University, Tominaga was professor in the Department of Engineering Informatics (1986-2006) and Dean of the Faculty of Information Science and Arts (2003-2006). During the 1987-1988 academic year, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University in California.

Dr. Tominaga's research is in the field of color imaging science. His interests include interaction of light with materials, color constancy, illuminant estimation, spectral imaging, digital archiving, color image rendering, omnidirectional imaging, imaging processing algorithms, and color image appearance.

Dr. Tominaga is active in several academic societies. He served on AIC Kyoto as an organizing committee member (1996-1997), and as a program committee member for the IS&T/SID Color Imaging Conference (1996-2004). In 2000, he founded the Visual Information Research Workshop in the Kansai Section of the Information Processing Society, Japan, and in 2001 the Visual Information Research Institute at Osaka Electro-Communication University, where he conducted many research projects as the chairman. He was conference co-Chair of the Eighth International Symposium on Multispectral Color Science (2006) and is now president of the Color Science Association of Japan. He has authored more than 150 scientific publications and received the Scientific Technology Award from the Suga Weathering Technology Foundation in Japan (2002) and an IEEE Fellow Award (2005).

Daniele Marini

for his contributions to computer graphics and his development of a practical approach to Retinex theory

Daniele Marini graduated with a degree in Physics from the Università di Milano in 1972. Since 1978, his research has encompassed several areas of graphics and image processing, with specific reference to visual simulation, realistic rendering, classification, image recognition and compression, color science and computational color models, and virtual reality. He taught Computer Graphics for the Graduate Program on Industrial Design at the Architecture Faculty of Politecnico di Milano (1996-1997) and is Associate Professor at the University of Milano, teaching Computer Graphics and Image Processing in the undergraduate programs in Informatics and Digital Communications. He is presently a member of the Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione.

Prof. Marini pioneered the field of image synthesis in Italy, contributed to the founding of the Italian journal PIXEL, and was one of the founders of the Italian Aicographics Association. He founded Eidos, the first Italian company to specialize in advanced image processing, and created the Laboratorio di Eidomatica at the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione.

He has been scientific secretary of the National Commission "Conoscenza per Immagini" of the National Committee of Science and Information Technology of the National Research Council, and a member of the Commission for the SMAU Prize for Software Industrial Design, the National University Council (1997-2006), and the Academic Senate of the Università di Milano (2003-2006). In 1998, he was appointed supervisor and coordinator of the initiatives on multimedia at Triennale di Milano. This year Prof. Marini started a new initiative on virtual reality, installing the first University Virtual Theater at the Università di Milano. Prof. Marini has published more than 130 scientific and dissemination papers, as well as authored two books. He has been consultant for many Italian private companies, including Laben, Agusta Sistemi, ACS, SEA Informatica, Olivetti, CISE, VTR, Delphi, UIC, AIS, Artech Video Record, and STMicroelectronics, and has coordinated many national and international research programs.

So far for the postcard from Albuquerque. Other 2007 IS&T Fellowship awardees were Ralph E. Jacobson for his contribution in the field of image quality metrics and his leadership in imaging science education, and Bahram Javidi for his contributions to 3-D imaging science, information security, and image recognition.