Verdun, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Biafra -- the headlines of the last century do not look great. War, hatred, and hunger have prompted politicians of the last century of the previous millennium to allocate large resources to research for the national interest. Remote sensing is a value-neutral term for research in electronic imaging for night vision, surveillance satellites, smart bombs, and early warning systems.
However, this is not the legacy of the Electronic Imaging Symposium. The IS&T and SPIE launched this Symposium when the Berlin Wall crumbled. The end of the cold war has also marked the end of big research. Before, a young researcher would have had to start his or her career humbly, doing grunt work for the senior fellows and slowly building a publication portfolio by working very hard. Giving a paper at a conference was a big hurdle to jump and was the first step on a career that would become comfortable only when the hair had grayed.
The Electronic Imaging Symposium is the stalwart of the new research paradigm. Rather than a stuffy restricted club, our Symposium has been more of a bazaar, where the emphasis is on the rapid communication of new ideas. The conference chairs have been courageous visionaries, who have been willing to take the risk of encouraging unknown researchers with brilliant ideas, a task that is much harder than accepting papers based on the author's fame.
In this new research paradigm, career is no longer an escalator where one moves up as long as one works hard. Today it is essential to build networks of colleagues with similar interests. New breakthroughs have to be detected immediately and must be assimilated in a very short time. In this situation the Symposium fulfills two roles.
The first role is to serve as a synchronization event for a community. Everybody hears the latest results and can contribute to that emergent property that is the state-of-the-art in electronic imaging.
The second role is to interact with others in the community, to seek clarification at the source, to discover new opportunities for synergism, and to learn about the war stories that cannot find a way in scholarly publications.
We are honored that we can launch the Symposium on Electronic Imaging into the new millennium. Before the conference tracks, a rich assortment of short courses allows you to quickly get in-depth knowledge from the masters of the art. The conferences are organized in programs that group similar research areas; a rigid system of synchronized presentations encourages you to hop from conference to conference, maximizing the likelihood of serendipity. Last but not least, the informal atmosphere is meant to encourage you to interact with the speakers; take advantage of discussion sessions, panel sessions, and receptions to network and build a strong community.
The various Conference Chairs have made a special effort to make their first conference of the new millennium a memorable event. The plenary speakers will reveal their roadmaps for the first decade in the new millennium. This year's Symposium is an event you cannot miss.
See you in San Jose
Giordano B. Beretta, Hewlett-Packard Co.
John J. McCann, McCann Imaging
Symposium Chairs