Organizers

1. Nabin Sharma
   Nabin Sharma is PhD candidate at the School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Griffith University, Australia. He received Master of Computer Application (MCA) and Master of Technology in Information Technology (M.Tech IT) from West Bengal University of Technology and Karnataka State Open University, respectively. From March 2007 till May 2011, he worked as a System Engineer and Design Lead at IBM India Private Ltd. Bangalore, India. He worked as a project linked researcher at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, from November 2005 till February 2007. He was also a faculty member at the Department of Information Technology, Jalpaiguri Govt. Engineering College, West Bengal. He received the GUPRS and GUIPRS scholarships of Griffith University in 2011. He was the runner’s up in ‘The Young IT Professional Award Competition 2006’ organized by the Computer Society of India (CSI), Eastern zone and was also nominated for the prestigious Young Scientist Award 2006 of The India Science Congress Association. He has published 23 papers in refereed book, conferences and journal. His research interests include Video Documents Processing, Document Analysis and Character Recognition.
2. Ranju Mandal
   Ranju Mandal is a PhD candidate at School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Australia. He has three years of research experience on Document Image Analysis (DIA) at CVPR unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He obtained Master in Computer Application from West Bengal University of Technology, Kolkata and Bachelor in Computer Application from the Burdwan University in 2007 and 2003, respectively. His research interest includes Pattern Recognition, Document Image Analysis and Document Image Retrieval.
3. Prof. Michael Blumenstein
   Michael Blumenstein is a Professor and Head of the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University, where he previously served as the Dean (Research) in the Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology Group. Michael is a nationally and internationally recognised expert in the areas of automated Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, and his current research interests include Document Analysis, Multi-Script Handwriting Recognition and Signature Verification. He has published over 132 papers in refereed books, conferences and journals. His research also spans various projects applying Artificial Intelligence to the fields of Engineering, Environmental Science, Neurobiology and Coastal Management. Michael has secured internal/nationally competitive research grants to undertake these projects with funds exceeding AUD$4.3 Million. Components of his research into the predictive assessment of beach conditions have been commercialised for use by local government agencies, coastal management authorities and in commercial applications. Following his achievements in applying Artificial Intelligence to the area of bridge engineering (where he has published widely and has been awarded federal funding), he was invited to serve on the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering’s Working Commission 6 to advise on matters pertaining to Information Technology. Michael is the first Australian to be elected onto this committee. In addition, he was previously the Chair of the Queensland Branch of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Computational Intelligence Society. He is also the Gold Coast Chapter Convener and a Board Member of the Australian Computer Society's Queensland Branch Executive Committee as well as the Chairman of the IT Forum Gold Coast and a Board Member of IT Queensland. Michael currently serves on the Australian Research Council's (ARC) College of Experts on the Engineering, Mathematics and Informatics (EMI) panel. In addition, he has recently been elected onto the Executive of the Australian Council of Deans of Information and Communication Technology (ACDICT). Michael also serves on a number of Journal Editorial Boards and has been invited to act as General Chair, Organising Chair, Program Chair and/or Committee member for numerous national/international conferences in his areas of expertise. In 2009 Michael was named as one of Australia’s Top 10 Emerging Leaders in Innovation in the Australian’s Top 100 Emerging Leaders Series supported by Microsoft. Michael is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
4. Prof. Umapada Pal
   Umapada Pal received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Indian Statistical Institute. His PhD work was on the development of printed Bangla OCR system. He did his Post Doctoral research at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique), France. From January 1997, he is a Faculty member of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and at present he is a Professor. His fields of research interest include Digital Document Processing, Optical Character Recognition, Camera/video text processing, Biometrics, etc. He has published more than 260 research papers in various international journals, conference proceedings and edited volumes. Because of his significant impact in the Document Analysis research, in 2003 he received “ICDAR Outstanding Young Researcher Award” from International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). In 2005-2006 Dr. Pal has received JSPS fellowship from Japan government. In 2008, 2011 and 2012, Dr. Pal received visiting fellowship from Spain, France and Australia government, respectively. Dr. Pal has been serving as General/Program/Organizing Chair of many conferences including International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), International Conference on Frontiers of Handwritten Recognition (ICFHR), International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems (DAS), Asian Conference on Pattern recognition (ACPR) etc. Also he has served as a program committee member of more than 50 international events. He has many international research collaborations and supervising Ph.D. students of 5 foreign universities. He is serving as associate Editor of the journal of ACM Transactions of Asian Language Information Processing (ACM-TALIP), Pattern recognition Letters (PRL), Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis (ELCVIA) etc. Also he has served as a guest editor of several special issues. He is a Fellow of IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition).