Photo: Professors N. Mirenkov, L. Nagamatsu, and A. Vazhenin with the winners of the Aizu Contest'98.
The Aizu International Student Forum-Contest on Multimedia is a new initiative to promote R&D of multimedia technologies and make use of these technologies for various applications, as well as to attract the attention of young researchers in Japan and abroad to new types of human-computer interactions.
The Aizu Contest'98 is our first attempt to organize a new forum where students will compete as well as become friends. We hope that in the future, it should be a combination between a contest and a student festival, or a joint event of a contest and a regular conference on multimedia. The Aizu Contest'98 attracted students from Germany, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Korea, Russia, and USA.
The forum included three types of the competition:
The paper contest,
The home-task contest, and
The on-site task contest.
Within the framework of the paper and home-task contests 16 projects were presented: seven projects from abroad (Italy, Hungary, Korea, Russia, and USA) and nine projects from the University of Aizu. In addition, seven students took part in the on-site task contest: three students from foreign countries (Germany, Russia, and USA) and four students from the University of Aizu. Total number of the project developers involved and remote participants exceeded 40 persons.
The team of referees consisted of Professors A. Belyaev, L. Nagamatsu, K. Naik, N. Mirenkov, V. Savchenko, M. Uedo, and A. Vazhenin.
Because of some students took part in two or even three branches of the contest, the jury tried to take it into account and make some integral evaluation. As a result, the grand prize (the newest notebook PC from NEC) was awarded to Mr. H.M. Kwon and his partners from Korea (J.S. Park and J.H. Kim) for their project on ``Euclidean Reconstruction from Uncalibrated Camera Images''. Geza Horvath, Gabor Banai, Zoltan Nagylaki from Hungary received the first prize (75,000 yen) for ``PDL Robots Represented in VRML Environment''. The second prize (50,000 yen) was given to Danial Burroughs from the USA for the project on ``Mobile Agents in Adaptive Hierarchical Bayesian Networks for Global Awareness''. A special prize for originality (50,000 yen) was awarded to Tetsuya Hirotomi, Kazuaki Nishiashitani, and Yuji Hasegawa from the University of Aizu for their project on ``Multimedia Cooking Recipes''. Five third prizes (each prize is 25,000 yen) was given to Yasunobu Asano, Tsukasa Ebihara, Masayuki Hisada, Rentaro Yoshioka (from the University of Aizu), and Vitali Morozov from Russia for their projects and activity during the contest. In addition, special prizes (the University of Aizu badges of 8,000 yen each) were awarded to Eiji Hamatsu, Hiroshi Saito, and Rentaro Yoshioka from the University of Aizu, Michael Kraus from Germany, Giorgio da Bormida from Italy, and Oleg Chunikhin from Russia.
The students of the University of Aizu showed a very good performance. This is an excellent example for other our students to take part in the Aizu Contest'99.
Nikolay Mirenkov
Chair of the Organizing Committee