Welcome back to Beyond the Patterns. So today we have an invited speaker, Alicia Fornes.

So she is an expert in handwritten document analysis and she will present her latest research.

Alicia is a senior research fellow at the Computer Vision Center, CVC, at the University

of Barcelona, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, UAB.

She has more than 100 publications and international conferences and journals.

She participated in many research and technology transfer projects related to the recognition

of handwriting documents.

She received the IAPR ICTA Young Investigator Award in 2017 for outstanding contributions

in the recognition of handwriting, text and graphics with high impact to the field of digital

humanities.

So you could say Alicia is one of the rising stars of the field.

Her research interests include historical document image analysis and handwriting recognition

as well as optical music recognition.

So you see that she has a broad variety of methods that she will present today and the

presentation is entitled Computer Vision Applied to Historical Handwritten Documents

Opportunities and Challenges.

Alicia thank you very much for accepting the invitation to our small seminar here and I'm

very much looking forward to your talk.

So the stage is yours.

Thank you very much for the invitation and let's hope that we see each other face to

face soon.

We'll see.

It's hard.

So the first thing that I would like to mention is just a couple of sentences concerning

the Computer Vision Center.

So we are in Barcelona.

So it started as a construction by the Catalan government at the UAB, Universitat Autonomia

de Barcelona and we are more than 100 people in Computer Vision.

So there is the line in mobility, transportation, autonomous driving.

We have also health, welfare, medical image analysis.

So I know that you are also working in this.

There are also industrial systems.

This is very related to tech transfer.

And we have the part of the media contents and of course document analysis, these reading

systems.

And we are quite a big group, many doctors, many students and we work in many different

aspects.

So different kinds of documents and also different kinds of tasks.

So you will see that there are some people appearing here and there in different publications

just to show that we are quite a big group and this is not just my own research.

So concerning documents, I'm very focused on handwriting recognition and this can appear

in historical documents.

This is related to cultural heritage, of course, and digital humanities.

Just to mention that still there is a work, a big work to do because there are many documents

even in Europe that are not yet digitized.

Just imagine transcribed, recognized, classified or indexed.

So the work is titanic.

And then in the case of modern documents, it may seem that everything goes by mail,

but not yet.

There are still many documents in paper.