We are taking part in a University-wide online event for prospective postgraduate students on Wednesday 11 November 2009 from 8.00am-11.00am GMT and 4.00pm-7.00pm GMT. You'll be able to chat online to course leaders and current postgraduate students, wherever you may be in the world. Read more and sign up for reminder emails.

Keith Parramore from the University of Brighton will speak on The Bottle Factory: Order From Chaos. Keith's lecture deals with what is meant by 'random selection'. What does 'random' mean? Chaotic? 'Pernicious'? Is random selection fair or do we empathise with the following quotation, heard on BBC Radio 4? 'Well, fairer in the sense that everyone's got an equal chance, but not fair in the sense that, well, it is literally a lottery'. In another quotation from Radio 4's 'Material World', an expert was trying to justify the need for the enormous computing power available from networked super computers: 'We build athematical models and then (need to) throw trillions of numbers at them'. What is this all about? In the lecture, Keith examines and develops the concept of randomness and then uses random numbers to drive a simulation to solve an industrial problem. If you have a calculator which will generate random numbers, bring it along! Download flyer (PDF 1.3 MB).

Kingston University is pleased to host the 5th International Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference (MOBIMEDIA 2009) which follows the successful previous editions held in Florida, Italy, Greece, and Finland. The efficient delivery of multimedia applications and services over emerging diverse and heterogeneous wireless networks is a challenging research objective and the conference aims to provide a unique international forum for researchers from industry and academia, working in multimedia coding, mobile communications and networking fields. Conference website.

Kingston University is pleased to host the 13th annual technical meeting which follows the successful series begun in Oxford in 1997. The meetings are designed to provide a UK forum for the dissemination and discussion of research in medical image understanding and analysis, an expanding area in which significant advances are currently being made. It is an area notable for the range of research communities involved, and the meeting aims to encourage the growth and raise the profile of this multi-disciplinary field by bringing together the various communities. Conference website.

This intensive course is aimed at postgraduate research students in the areas of Computer Vision, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. It is organised with the assistance of the British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition (BMVA) and the Digital Imaging Research Centre, Kingston University (DIRC). More information and registration

Speaker: Prof Tim Ellis. Email to register your interest. More information
Synopsis:
Britain is often described as the prime example of the surveillance society, with the oft-quoted statistic of some 4.2 million CCTV cameras in operation across the country, spying on us. It would be realistic to assume that only a tiny proportion of these video cameras are being continuously monitored by human operators, and hence some of the benefits (or threats) associated with their operation may not be realised. Whilst video appears to represent the most intrusive form of surveillance, in reality identifying individuals from video remains a challenging problem.
In practice, CCTV is used for a wide range of tasks beyond surveillance, based on remote monitoring for safety management, traffic management, safety, security and other aspects of law enforcement.
This talk will consider the emergence of video analytics: computer algorithms that analyse the CCTV video images, detecting and interpreting the behaviour of moving objects such as people and vehicles, with the aim of mimicking the operation of the human visual system. The current state-of-the-art still falls some way short of the capabilities of human visual perception, though there are tasks where the computer is gaining ground.

Professor Robert Istepanian delivered a keynote address at the IET inaugural conference on Assisted Living. View a webcast of the address here. Robert Istepanian is a Professor of Data Communications & Director of Mobile Information and Network Technologies Research Centre (MINT). The keynote took place at Kingston University, UK, The IET Assisted living conference, 25-Mar-2009.

The impact of intellectual property in the IT field seems to be constantly in the headlines with illegal music downloaders being threatened with court proceedings, the proposed extension of the copyright term, software patents vs. open source to name but a few hot topics. The talk explained the full range of intellectual property available under the law and explored the myths and realities of how intellectual property laws affect people's lives in IT.

Presented by Professor George Rzevski, Professor Emeritus, Complexity Science and Design, The Open University; Founder, Magenta Corporation, London, UK and Samara, Russia; Founder and Chairman, Emergent Intelligence Technology, Inc., Jacksonville, USA. http://www.rzevski.net/
As the information-based services replaced manufacturing as the main source of wealth creation and employment, the complexity of the Internet-based global market increased to such an extend that the current generation of information systems is not capable of supporting businesses straggling to cope with market dynamics. A new paradigm of intelligent information systems is required to support administrations and businesses. Design principles of new systems and many practical examples of their applications in logistics, knowledge discovery and semantic search, developed and implemented by the speaker and his team of two hundred programmers, will be described. More, including photographs from the lecture