CBA is collaboration between Uppsala University (UU) and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), which started in 1988. This means that CBA celebrated 25 years in 2013! From an organizational point of view, CBA was an independent entity within our host universities until 2010.
At UU, we are hosted by the Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology and today belong to one of five divisions within the Dept. of Information Technology (IT), the Division of Visual Information and Interaction (Vi2). At SLU, we today belong to the Dept. of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology in Umeå. The organizational matters are outlined in Section 2. The re-organizations have not prevented us from continuing and expanding our research. We foresee opportunities for collaborations among our close colleagues at UU and SLU.
During 2013, a total of 39 persons were working at CBA: 18 researchers, 19 PhD students, one technical staff, and one administrator. Additionally, 17 Master thesis students completed their thesis work with supervision from CBA. This does not mean, however, that we have had more than 50 full-time persons at CBA: many have split appointments, part time at CBA and part time elsewhere, adding up to approximately 30 full-time employments. Having world class scientists visiting CBA and CBA staff visiting their groups, for longer or shorter periods, is an important ingredient of our activities.
Most of us at CBA also undertake some undergraduate teaching. Previously this has been organised by other divisions, but with the organizational changes our new division now handles undergraduate education.
We can conclude that the activities remain high. On average, three PhD dissertations are produced each year at CBA. Nevertheless, in 2013 there was no PhD exam. On the other hand, we expect as many as eight (8!) PhD theses to be defended in 2014. In 2013, we published 50 internationally reviewed papers, more than any year before in the history of CBA. There are several reasons for this. The main reason is that so many of our PhD students are at the end of their studies, which is when they publish most. Another reason is that we have more researchers than before and are involved in more co-operation projects.
We had continued support from the Disciplinary Domain of Medicine and Pharmacy, the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab), and strategic resources within the Dept. of IT. The strong economy has led to recruitments of new PhD students and researchers during the year. A successful example of collaboration we have is with the Dept. of Radiology, Oncology, and Radiation Sciences; Section of Radiology, where two of our staff members work part time in order to be close to radiology researchers.
In 2013, we have established ourselves within the field of automatic reading of old hand-written documents, referred to as HTR (Hand-written Text Recognition). The framework project is funded by VR, with support from the Vice Chancellor, and is truly multi-disciplinary, with partners from the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Uppsala University Library.
An outreach activity that was particularly important was the 11th International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology (ISMM 2013) held in Uppsala in May with 69 participants. See http://www.cb.uu.se/ismm2013. Researchers from both universities were active in the arrangements.
Another outreach activity we have is our participation in the annual symposium on image analysis, arranged by the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis in March. In 2013, it was held in Gothenburg and CBA accounted for about a quarter of the participants with 20 registrations. Image processing is highly inter- and multi-disciplinary, with foundations in mathematics, statistics, physics, signal processing and computer science, and with applications in many diverse fields. We are working in a wide range of application areas, most of them related to life sciences and usually in close collaboration with domain experts. Our collaborators are found locally as well as nationally and internationally. For a complete list of our 45 national and 30 international collaborators see Section 5.6.
Ingela Nyström, our director, continues to coordinate the strategic research programme in the e-science field, eSSENCE. She terminated her position on the board of the Swedish University Computer Network, SUNET, during 2013.
We are very active in international and national societies. Both Ewert Bengtsson and Gunilla Borgefors are elected members of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). Ingela Nyström is elected member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Uppsala. Gunilla Borgefors is Editor in Chief for the journal Pattern Recognition Letters and Cris Luengo is Area Editor for the same journal. Ewert Bengtsson is associate editor of Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine. Ingela Nyström serves as Secretary of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, IAPR. Researchers at CBA also served on several other journal editorial boards, scientific organization boards, conference committees, and PhD dissertation committees. In addition, we took a very active part in reviewing grant applications and scientific papers submitted to conferences and journals.
In addition to the more common ways of spreading information about our activities and work, such as seminar series, publications, web-pages, etc., we have our ``CBA TV''. Short ``trailers'' on our projects and activities are presented on an LCD monitor facing the main entrance stairway where students and colleagues from other groups pass by.
This annual report is also available on the CBA webpage, see http://www.cb.uu.se/annual_report/AR2013.png
