Dr. Alicia Fornes, winner of the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award 2017

Dr. Alicia Fornes, winner of the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award 2017

CVC Researcher Dr. Alicia Fornes has been awarded the IAPR/ICDAR young investigator award for her “outstanding contributions in the recognition of handwriting, text and graphics, with high impact to the field of Digital Humanities, and her service to the IAPR Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition” the IAPR official communication states. IAPR/ICDAR awards look to prize people who have contributed significantly in the area of document analysis and recognition in one or more of the following areas: research, training, academy-industry interaction and service to the profession. The distinction is awarded every two years and it’s the most prestigious award within this area. Dr. Fornes is a senior research fellow (Ramon y Cajal programme) at UAB and researcher at the Computer Vision Center, as well as the scientific coordinator of the Digital Humanities Research Network of the UAB. She received her B.S. degree in Computer Science in 2003 from the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), and her PhD in Computer Vision from UAB in 2009. Currently, she is the co-director of the projects XARXES(Recercaixa programme) and CONCORDIA (R+D projects programme from the Spanish Ministery of Economy and Competitivity), that intend to develop computational techniques based in computer vision applied to the recognition of historical manuscripts. These projects want to build historical social networks from the nominal relation of the inhabitants registered in the census of neighbour locations in the XIX and XX centuries. The awards ceremony will be held during ICDAR2017 (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition) in Kyoto, Japan, in November. These prizes are awarded by the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition) formed by researchers and scientists of different areas and countries that work within Artificial Intelligence applied to the recognition of shapes and patterns. Bi-annually, the IAPR awards two prizes, the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award, that wants to reward younger researchers and the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award, which looks to recognise the excellence in the career path of senior researchers.