WIREDGOV

Dr Cordelia Schmid, from INRIA France will present the 5th Karen Spärck Jones Lecture, which honours women in computing research. The lecture is hosted by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, and sponsored by IBM. This year’s lecture is entitled: Automatic Understanding of the Visual World.

Dr Schmid explains: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software. One of the central problems of AI research is machine perception i.e. the ability to understand the visual world based on the input from sensors such as cameras. Computer vision is the area which analyses visual input. A few selected subproblems are facial recognition, object recognition and activity recognition.”

Dr Schmid who is the Research Director and Head of the LEAR (LEArning and Recognition in Vision) Project Team continues: “In this talk, I will present recent progress in visual understanding. It is for the most part due to design of robust visual representations and learned models capturing the variability of the visual world. Progress has resulted in technology for a variety of applications; I will present a few examples. This being said, the gap between human and machine performance is still enormous. I will discuss future research necessary to reduce this gap.”

Paul Martynenko, IBM says: “I’m delighted that, together with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT we’re honouring Karen Spärck Jones in this way. It’s important to showcase what women have achieved in computing if we are to encourage more women into the discipline. Like Karen Spärck Jones before her, Dr Schmid is a pioneer and an inspiration in the IT community and I’m thrilled that she is speaking at this year’s event.”

The Karen Spärck Jones lecture series builds on the activities to celebrate, inform and support women engaged in computing. These include the annual London Hopper, providing networking opportunities for early career researchers, and theLovelace Colloquium, for women undergraduates in computing and related subjects.

About the lecture
The lecture is being held at BCS London office in Southampton Street on 20 May 2015 and is free to attend. 
More information about the Karen Spärck Jones lecture and to register

The evening event will follow the London Hopper at the BCS Headquarters.
Registrations for the London Hopper are now also open

Biography for Dr Cordelia Schmid
Cordelia Schmid holds a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and a Doctorate, also in Computer Science, from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG).

Her doctoral thesis on "Local Greyvalue Invariants for Image Matching and Retrieval" received the best thesis award from INPG in 1996. She received the Habilitation degree in 2001 for her thesis entitled "From Image Matching to Learning Visual Models". Dr Schmid was a post-doctoral research assistant in the Robotics Research Group of Oxford University in 1996 - 1997.

Since 1997 she has held a permanent research position at INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes, where she is a research director and directs the INRIA team called LEAR for LEArning and Recognition in Vision. Dr Schmid is the author of over a hundred technical publications.

She has been an Associate Editor for IEEE PAMI (2001 - 2005) and for IJCV (2004 - 2012), editor-in-chief for IJCV (2013 -), a program chair of IEEE CVPR 2005 and ECCV 2012 as well as a general chair of IEEE CVPR 2015.

In 2006 and 2014, she was awarded the Longuet-Higgins prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision that have withstood the test of time. She is a fellow of IEEE. In 2013, she was awarded an ERC advanced grant.

In June 2015, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, will be running a month long campaign to highlight the need for more women to join the IT profession. The aim is to encourage women of all ages, from young students to women returners, to consider a career in IT.

Contact the Press Office