The annual symposium of the Benelux Working Group for Information and Communication Theory was this time organized by Prof. A. Barbe, Prof. E.C. van der Meulen and Dr. P. Vanroose of the "Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven", Belgium. The venue of the symposium was in the conference centre "Bremberg", just outside Haasrode in a beautiful landscape setting with good weather and was certainly inspiring to meet other researchers and scientists in the field of digital coding, communication and information theory. About 50 people attended this symposium, mostly from the Benelux itself, some guests appeared from eastern Europe. In total, 29 papers were presented, requiring an afternoon parallel session. Main topics of the seven sessions were compression and video coding, cryptography, speech processing and communication networks, classification and estimation theory, Shannon theory and signal processing and finally, channel coding.
The first session covered a number of presentations on the Context Tree Weighting coding system and an application for language modelling. The second half of the session focussed on image coding with a.o. vector quantization, non-static texture coding and embedded video compression for TV systems. In both Cryptography sessions, a number of papers dealt with the timestamping problem, improvements on various crypto schemes, and the second session concluded with a presentation on electronic payment. The speech coding session involved two papers on quality improvement by either noise reduction or subjective quality testing. The last paper presented a scheme for a special coder for GSM telephones, in which the combination of the speech coder and the employed channel code depends on the quality of the channel. This system was also demonstrated with a prototype. The session on estimation contained papers on linear feature transformations, neural networks and colour pattern recognition. The session on Shannon theory dealt with papers on a.o. random parameter channels, feedback channels, duality of source and channel coding, AR coefficient optimization and resource management for adaptive modelling. The last session on channel coding concentrated on more practical issues, such as multirate codes, the BMC channel without feedback, concatenated channel coding schemes and coding for random-access channels. For more details, the symposium proceedings are available in a nice booklet, ISBN 90-71048-14-4, which can be obtained at the Technical University of Delft (NL), Information Theory Department.
On friday morning, the symposium was enhanced by an invited lecture of Fritz von Haeseler, KU Leuven, Belgium, and University Bremen, Germany, about automatic sequences. On Thursday evening, the banquet was held in a pleasant atmosphere and most of the participants enjoyed the high quality of the kitchen and its wine cellar. As a pleasant surprise, Sergio Verdu, second Vice President IEEE Information Theory Society, attended the dinner. For the second time, the Gauss Foundation kindly supported its paper prize for the best young researchers presentation. The prize was shared this time by two winners: Bert DeKnuydt, KU Leuven, on "Efficient coding of non-static texture in 3D scenes" and Jean Cardinal, Brussels Free University, with a paper entitled "A fast full search equivalent for mean-shape-gain vector quantizers". The annual plenary meeting of WIC members was efficiently supervised so that all could enjoy the combination of Belgian summer sun and traditonal beer.
Peter H.N. de With
Mannheim, July 12, 1999.