CBA is a collaboration between Uppsala University (UU) and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). This year we celebrated our 20th anniversary with two events: a presentation of our work with coffee and cake for our neighbours at Polacksbacken and a reception for invited VIPs that had special importance for CBA over the years.
During 2009, a total of 35 persons have been working at CBA: 18 researchers, 16 PhD students and one administrator. Additionally, seven Master thesis students have finished their thesis work with supervision from CBA. This does, however, not mean that we have had 42 full-time persons at CBA; many have split appointments, part time at CBA and part time elsewhere, most commonly at the Dept. of Information Technology. Two senior researchers, Stina Svensson and Carolina Wählby, have almost left us, taking on positions at other organisations, but retaining a small position at CBA to fulfil supervising their PhD students until graduation. If we sum up the time working for CBA for all of us, then we had the about 23 full-time full-year equivalents excluding undergraduate teaching and not counting Master thesis students. The employees are formally employed at either university. The whole of CBA is administered through UU. Most of us at CBA also pursue some undergraduate teaching, which is organized by the Dept. of Information Technology at UU.
On average we have 3-4 PhD dissertations per year with significant variations over time. In 2009 we had two dissertations: Amalka Pinidiyaarachchi at UU and Maria Axelsson at SLU. The traditional conferment ceremony at UU when the new doctors receive their laurels was special to us this year since no less than four of our new doctors received their laurels and Ewert Bengtsson served as conferrer, a once in a lifetime honor.
We have been successful in achieving a remarkably good gender balance among our researchers considering the fact that we are a technical research unit. This was acknowledged this year as Ewert Bengtsson received the Uppsala University Equality Price on our behalf. Other awards this year was the Benzelius award from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala which was awarded to Robin Strand and the best paper award at the international conference ISPA'09 to Erik Wernersson. We were also happy to have one of our researcher, Carolina Wählby, qualify as a docent, bringing the total number of CBA docents up to seven.
Image processing is highly interdisciplinary, its foundations being in mathematics, statistics, physics, signal processing and computer science, and with applications found 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 experts from the particular application area. Our co-operation partners are found locally as well as nationally and internationally. For a complete list of our 41 national and 39 international co-operation partners, see Section 5.7. One of our co-operation partners is almost in-house since UPPMAX, Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science, is managed by Ingela Nyström and administrated by Lena Wadelius.
From a methodological point of view, our focus is on discrete geometry and multi-dimensional images, both spatially and spectrally. We have over the last several years expanded our activities in perceptualization, i.e. visualisation and haptics. Our studio 3DIS4U, 3D Image Studio for Uppsala, is used for our seminars and for some classes and external events. During 2009 we started a new major project in this area, under leadership of our visiting professor Ingrid Carlbom, with the goal of creating an augmented reality system in which you can see, feel, and manipulate virtual 3D objects as if they were real.
We also used our visualisation skills in creating the ``CBA TV'', a continuously running presentation of our work in the form of very short ``trailers'' on a LCD monitor facing the main entrance stairway. We often see students and colleagues from other departments stop a few moments to look at our latest project trailer.
We are very active in international and national societies. Ingela Nyström served as second vice-president of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and Gunilla Borgefors serves on its advisory committee. She is also Area Editor for Pattern Recognition Letters. Ingrid Carlbom is co-chair of the editorial board of Graphical Models. Researchers at CBA also served on several other Journal editorial boards, boards of scientific organisations and conference committees. Ingela Nyström served on half a dozen dissertation committees, the rest of us managed about that many together. And we took a very active part in reviewing grant applications and scientific papers submitted to conferences and journals. Ewert Bengtsson served as chair of the Evaluation Panel for Medical Engineering for the Swedish Research Council. Locally he serves as senior advisor to the Rector of UU on information technology and also as Chair of the university IT-council, together with many other related appointments.
Since 1993/94, CBA assembles extensive annual reports, such as this document, that describes in some detail what we have achieved during the year. These annual reports are intended for anyone interested in our work. Note that each Section in this report starts with a short summary printed in a larger font than the following detailed material. This year the report has a very special feature, an original poem by Douglas Hofstadter. We had the pleasure of hosting him during his visit to Uppsala to give the prestigeous Celsius lecture, the topic of the poem.
Our annual reports have been available on the Internet since 1998. For this issue, see
http://www.cb.uu.se/verksamhet/annual_report/AR09html/