Register today for EI

Today is the last day to save $100 over onsite pricing for the Electronic Imaging symposium registration.

• Link to the registration
• Link to the Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications final program
• Special treat: Industry Panel on Future Directions in Parallel Processing with panelists from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, NVIDIA, and Google

IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging is the must attend event for all aspects of electronic imaging, including imaging systems, image processing, image quality, and algorithms. The Symposium Steering Committee, chaired by Sabine Süsstrunk, is starting a new exciting conference on Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications as part of the program track on Image Processing.

Aim of the conference

Papers in this conference fuse parallel implementation design principles under physical constraints with an understanding of imaging applications.

Imaging translates information into and out of the visual system with today's computation engine of choice: digital electronic systems. While scalar architectures are no longer scaling at historical rates, we see a massive explosion in the total number of connected computation devices and the ways that hardware architectures and software parallel programming environments use these devices to work in concert and in parallel. From the computing cloud to map-reduce programming models and systems to multi-core CPUs to the regular layout of graphics processing units (GPUs) to the increasing capacity of FPGA fabrics, a range of parallel architectures and parallel programming environments are available to designers and researchers to solve computationally complex problems in efficient (and often real-time) imaging applications.

Under physical constraints such as power, speed, and/or cost, the data throughput and degree of data dependence of imaging applications suggest a good match between parallel architectures and imaging applications; similarly, the choice of parallel architectures often reflects the structure of the imaging problem targeted by the application. Thus, the duality of imaging problem definition and parallelism implies that the efficient implementation of parallelism for imaging offers insight into the mind's internal imaging computation. This duality also implies that measures of parallel efficiency can formalize the definition of many imaging problems. This conference explores this duality through new parallel designs for imaging and architectures and design tools to optimize parallelism in imaging algorithms.

Why should you attend the Electronic Imaging Symposium?

The IS&T and SPIE launched this symposium at a historical juncture; the end of the cold war in the late Eighties has marked the end of big research. Before, a young researcher would have had to start his or her career humbly, doing grunt work for the senior fellows and slowly building a publication portfolio by working very hard. Giving a paper at a conference was a big hurdle to jump and was the first step on a career.

The Electronic Imaging Symposium is the stalwart of the new research paradigm of this Millennium. Rather than a stuffy restricted club, this symposium has been more of an uplifting bazaar, where the emphasis is on the rapid communication of new ideas. The conference chairs have been courageous visionaries, who have been willing to take the risk of encouraging unknown researchers with brilliant ideas, a task that is much harder than accepting papers based on the author's fame.

In this new research paradigm, career is no longer an escalator where one moves up as long as one works hard. Today there are many different — often intersecting — paths up the hill to successful careers; therefore, it is essential to build networks of colleagues with similar interests. New breakthroughs have to be detected immediately and must be assimilated in a very short time. In this situation the symposium fulfills two roles.

• The first role is to serve as a synchronization event for a community. Everybody hears the latest results and can contribute to that emergent property that is the state-of-the-art in electronic imaging
• The second role is to interact with others in the community, to seek clarification at the source, to discover new opportunities for synergism, and to learn about the war stories that cannot find a way in scholarly publications

A rich assortment of short courses allows you to quickly get in-depth knowledge from the masters of the art. The conferences are organized in programs that group similar research areas; the system of synchronized presentations encourages you to hop from conference to conference, maximizing the likelihood of serendipity. Last but not least, the informal atmosphere is meant to encourage you to interact with the speakers; take advantage of discussion sessions, panel sessions, and receptions to network and build a strong community.

The various Conference Chairs have made a special effort to make this conference a memorable event. The plenary speakers will reveal their road maps for the future. This year's symposium is an event you cannot miss.

See you 23–27 January 2011 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport!