Organizers

Jean-Marc OGIER received his PhD degree in computer science from University of Rouen, France, in 1994. During this period (1991-1994), he worked on graphic recognition for Matra Ms&I Company. Full professor at University of La Rochelle, Pr Ogier is the head of L3i laboratory which gathers more than 120 members and works mainly of Document Analysis and Content Management. Author of more than 160 publications / communications in international conferences and journals, he managed several French and European projects dealing with historical document analysis, either with public institutions, or with private companies. Pr Ogier was Deputy Director of the GDR I3 of the French National Research Centre (CNRS) between 2005 and 2013 (800 members). He was also Chair of the Technical Committee 10 (Graphic Recognition) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) from 2010 to 2015, and is the representative member of France at the governing board of the IAPR, serving as a member of the international liaison committee. Jean-Marc Ogier has been the general chair of the program chair of several international scientific events dealing with document analysis (DAS, ICDAR, GREC, …) and serves on the Editorial Board of several international journals : IJDAR (International Journal in Document Analysis and Recognition), ELCVIA, (Electronic Letter on Computer Vision and Image Analysis). Jean-Marc Ogier has created the association VALCONUM (valconum.fr), the aim of which is to create an «academico-industrial» ecosystem allowing to develop European competitiveness for both its academic and industrial members. He has been serving as the President of the University of La Rochelle 2016.

Utpal Garain received his bachelor and master degrees in computer science and engineering in 1994 and 1997, respectively from Jadavpur University, India and Ph.D. degree from Indian Statistical Institute in 2005. He received post doctoral fellowship from CNRS, France and studied in Univ. of Rouen, France for one year in 2004. Prof. Garain started his career in software industries like Larsen & Toubro Ltd. Mumbai, Dun & Dradstreet Satyam Software, Chennai, etc. and later on, he joined Indian Statistical Institute. Nicolas Sidère is a postdoctoral research engineer at the L3i laboratory of La Rochelle. He received his M.sC. degree in Computer Science from the University of La Rochelle, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University François Rabelais of Tours. His directors was Jean-Yves Ramel from the LI Laboratory of Tours and he was also supervised by Pierre Héroux from LITIS Laboratory of Rouen. His PhD Dissertation deals with structural pattern recognition and more precisely graph embedding classification methods. He is mainly interested in content based information systems (retrieval, classification), document analysis (historical and contemporary) and more recently on computational document forensics.

Nicolas Sidère is a postdoctoral research engineer at the L3i laboratory of La Rochelle. He received his M.sC. degree in Computer Science from the University of La Rochelle, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University François Rabelais of Tours. His directors was Jean-Yves Ramel from the LI Laboratory of Tours and he was also supervised by Pierre Héroux from LITIS Laboratory of Rouen. His PhD Dissertation deals with structural pattern recognition and more precisely graph embedding classification methods. He is mainly interested in content based information systems (retrieval, classification), document analysis (historical and contemporary) and more recently on computational document forensics.

Chawki Djeddi is presently working as Associate Professor in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Tebessa, Tebessa, Algeria. He received his PhD in 2014 from Badji Mokhtar-Annaba University, Annaba, Algeria and specializes in document image analysis and recognition. His research interests include image processing and pattern recognition with applications to document image analysis, content based image retrieval and signature verification on disguised signatures and skilled forgeries. He has been regularly participating in the top conferences in areas of document analysis and handwriting recognition. He has also participated in several scientific competitions (nine in total) organized in conjunction with ICDAR and ICFHR conferences. Among these competitions, two of their submitted systems were ranked first. He also had the opportunity to participate in the organization of several National and International conferences held at the University of Tebessa. In addition, he has collaborated as a member on two research projects. Currently, he is a member of the Laboratory of Mathematics, Informatics and Systems (LAMIS) at the University of Tebessa. He is also member of several scientific associations including Groupe de Recherche en Communication Ecrite (French-speaking association on handwriting recognition), Association Française pour la Reconnaissance et l'Interprétation des Formes (IAPR representative French-speaking association), the International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). From 2010 onwards, he has also supervised a number of Masters Theses. As a part of his professional activities, in addition to teaching, he also takes up several administrative responsibilities as requested and when needed.

Imran Siddiqi is presently working as Professor in the department of Computer Science, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He received his PhD in 2009 from Paris Descartes University, Paris, France and specializes in application of pattern recognition techniques to computerized analysis of handwriting. He is an active researcher, won a number of research grants and served on the program committees/review panels of a number of reputed conferences/journals. He is also one of the founding members as well as the liaison chair of PPRS, the Pakistan chapter of IAPR.

Haikal El Abed is professional technical trainer at the TTC Riyadh managed by the GIZ GmbH. He is responsible for design and training of Learning Programs in Vocational Disciplines and ICT fields. He was a Senior Research Engineer at the Braunschweig Technical University, Germany. Since 2001, he has been working at the Institute for Communications Technology (IfN), Department of Signal Processing for Mobile Information Systems. He has specialized in image and signal processing, document analysis systems design and configuration, and Arabic/Latin manuscripts recognition. He coordinated different national and international research projects and is one of the developers of the IfN/ENIT-Database (used by more than 100 research groups from more than 30 countries). He organized several competitions in these research fields. He has organized different special sessions with the topics Arabic\Latin handwriting\printed recognition technologies on international conferences and was invited for different talks. He has more than 90 papers, including journal papers and book chapters. He is a member of IEEE, DAGM, IAPR (TC-10 and TC-11), and VDE/VDI and a frequent reviewer for international journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and Pattern Recognition Letters. He is a member of the program committee of different international conferences and workshops.