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.
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 belonged to the Dept. of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology in Umeå until the end of 2014. The organizational matters are outlined in Section 2. The re-organizations have not prevented us from continuing and expanding our research.
A total of 42 people were working at the CBA in 2014: 20 PhD students, 20 researchers, one technical staff, and one administrator. Additionally, 13 Master 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 of us have split appointments, part time at CBA and part time elsewhere, adding up to approximately 30 full-time equivalents. 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 CBA staff undertake some undergraduate teaching. Previously this has been organised by other divisions, but with the organizational changes our division now handles undergraduate education. We are particularly pleased that Anders Hast qualified as Excellent Teacher at UU during 2014.
We conclude that the activities in 2014 were the highest in the history of CBA. It was a record with as many as seven (7!) PhD students who graduated during the year. In 2014, we published more than 45 internationally reviewed papers, which is among the highest numbers over the years. There are several reasons for this. The main reason is that so many of our PhD students were 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 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.
An outreach activity that was particularly important was the 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2014) held in Stockholm in August with 1200 participants. See http://www.icpr2014.org/. A majority of the CBA staff was active in the arrangements. See Section 7.1.
Another outreach activity that may be mentioned is our participation in the annual national symposium organized by the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis (SSBA), which in March 2014 was held in Luleå. CBA accounted for more than a quarter of participants by 25 registrations. A proof as good as any that CBA is the largest image analysis group in Sweden.
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 46 national and 39 international collaborators, see Section 5.6.
We are very active in international and national societies and are pleased that our leaders are recognised in these societies. In fact, the past Head Ewert Bengtsson was elevated to IEEE Fellow at the end of 2014. It is worth mentioning that also the past Head Gunilla Borgefors is an IEEE Fellow (since 2008), which means that CBA now contributes with two out of a total of approximately 50 Swedish IEEE Fellows. The current Head Ingela Nyström has served as Secretary of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) during 2010-2014 and was in August 2014 elected President of IAPR. 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 of SSBA since 2009.
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. Nyström continues to coordinate the strategic research programme in the e-science field, eSSENCE. She was appointed member of the Council for Research Infrastructure (RFI) within the Swedish Research Council from January 1, 2014.
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. 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.
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 ``info-screen''. Short trailers on our projects and activities are presented on an LCD monitor facing both entrances to our corridor at Polacksbacken, building 2, where many many students and colleagues from other groups pass on a daily basis.
This annual report is also available on the CBA webpage, see http://www.cb.uu.se/annual_report/AR2014.pdf