CBA was founded in 1988 and was until 2014 a collaboration between Uppsala University (UU) and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). From an organizational point of view, CBA was an independent entity within our host universities until 2010. Today, we are hosted by the Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology and belong to one of five divisions within the Dept. of Information Technology (IT), the Division of Visual Information and Interaction (Vi2). The organizational matters are further outlined in Section 2.
A total of 36 people were working at the CBA in 2015: 16 PhD students, 18 researchers, one technical staff, and one administrator. Additionally, 16 Master students completed their thesis work with supervision from CBA. This does not mean, however, that we had 36 full-time persons at CBA; many of us have split appointments, part time at CBA and part time elsewhere, adding up to around 30 full-time equivalents. The number of staff in the CBA corridor fluctuates over the year thanks to that we have world class scientists visiting CBA and CBA staff visiting their groups, for longer or shorter periods, as an important ingredient of our activities. Among our staff members, we are pleased that Nataša Sladoje qualified as Docent at UU bringing the total number of CBA docents to thirteen.
The activity level in 2015 was high with a total of 64 ongoing research projects involving 39 international and around 50 national collaboration partners. This resulted in 4 PhD theses during the year as well as 21 journal papers and 25 fully reviewed conference papers.
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 Division of Radiology, where two of our staff members work part time in order to be close to radiology researchers and also have funding from there.
We are active in organizing conferences and seminars. Gunilla Borgefors has served as Chair of the committee organizing the prestigious Celsius-Linné Lectures for Uppsala University. On May 26, CBA organized a seminar in honour of one of the founders of CBA, Ewert Bengtsson as he became Professor Emeritus. In October, we were part of the organizing and program committees of the Swedish Medical Engineering Days that were held in Uppsala with a few hundred participants. We also hosted the 9th workshop on medical image analysis for early detection of cervical cancer as part of our long standing collaboration with India in that field.
Also this year, we participated in the annual national symposium organized by the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis (SSBA), which in March 2015 was held in Ystad. CBA accounted for a quarter of the participants by 23 registrations -- a proof as good as any that CBA is the largest image analysis group in Sweden. In 2016, we are hosting the 40-year anniversary symposium for SSBA with Robin Strand as general chair.
We are very active in international and national societies and are pleased that our leaders are recognised in these societies. Ingela Nyström is President of IAPR, the International Association of Pattern Recognition, during 2014-2016. Nationally, CBA currently has two board members in the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis (SSBA), Ida-Maria Sintorn and Anders Brun; Ida-Maria Sintorn has served as Treasurer since 2009. Ewert Bengtsson has served on the board of Swedish Bioimaging and as he now is retiring from that position, Carolina Wählby is taking over. Researchers at CBA were asked to give invited talks at 7 conferences at the international level.
During the last few years, we have been active on both national and local level to establish biomedical image analysis and biomedical engineering as more well-supported strategic research areas. During 2015, we finally succeeded in having a new national ``strategic innovation area'' Medtech4Health established. On the local level, the UU Faculties of Science and Technology and Medicine and Pharmacy agreed to establish a new Centre for Medical Engineering at the UU Hospital. We look forward to the increased funding and collaboration opportunities we expect to be the results of these new structures.
CBA has several elected members of learned socities. Ewert Bengtsson, Gunilla Borgefors, and Christer Kiselman are elected members of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. Christer Kiselman and Ingela Nyström are elected members of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Uppsala. In addition, Ewert Bengtsson and Gunilla Borgefors are elected members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). Nyström continued to coordinate the strategic research programme in the e-science field, eSSENCE. She is also Vice-Chair of the Council for Research Infrastructure (RFI) within the Swedish Research Council. Carolina Wählby received the prestigious Thureus Prize from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. Gunilla Borgefors is Editor-in-Chief for the journal Pattern Recognition Letters. Researchers at CBA also serve on several other journal editorial boards, scientific organization boards, conference committees, and PhD dissertation committees. In addition, we take an active part in reviewing grant applications and scientific papers submitted to conferences and journals.
This annual report is available in printed form as well as on the CBA webpage, see http://www.cb.uu.se/annual_report/AR2015.pdf