Initiatives & Trends

The IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee (HAC) is currently soliciting proposals for one of its 2016 funding opportunities.

For our August 2016 issue, we cover recent patents dealing with hardware and algorithmic issues of image registration. The section below covers patents granted recently for rigid and elastic image registration, patch matching, image alignment under low contrast or illumination, and specific devices constructed for the task.

Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has made great progress in recent years including Google's Go-playing AI AlphaGo beating world-class player Lee Se-dol in a 4-1 victory. While AI surpasses human intelligence in many tasks, the way it works is very different from the human brain. Dr. Dhruv Batra from Virginia Tech gave a presentation on whether humans and AI look at the same regions when answering visual questions, at Data Science Summit 2016, in San Francisco, CA. https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1606.03556/

For our August 2016 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of pedestrian detection using various signal processing approaches. The topic represents a central issue in up-to-date research on self driving vehicles, surveillance and city monitoring.