The 99th Tsinghua Information Forum - Samsung 3th Lecture was held on March 26th 2013, in Room 511, Central Main Building. Professor Edwin Hancock from York University gave a talk on Network Analysis: Characterising structure, complexity and learning. This talk focused on how graph-structures can be compactly characterised using measurements motivated by diffusion processes and random walks, how the heat kernel, i.e. the solution of the heat equation, can be used to characterize graph structure in a compact way and then explored a number of applications of these ideas in image analysis and computer vision. This lecture was invited by Professor Zhou Jie and organized by associate Professor Feng Jianjiang of the Department of Automation. Over 50 students and teachers from the SIST attended the lecture.

Professor Edwin Hancock main research interests are in the use of optimization and probabilistic methods for high and intermediate level vision. He is also interested in the methodology of structural and statistical and pattern recognition. He is currently working on graph matching, shape-from-X, image databases, and statistical learning theory. His work has found applications in areas such as radar terrain analysis, seismic section analysis, remote sensing, and medical imaging. He has published about 135 journal papers and 500 refereed conference publications. He was awarded the Pattern Recognition Society medal in 1991 and an outstanding paper award in 1997 by the journal Pattern Recognition. He has also received best paper prizes at CAIP 2001, ACCV 2002, ICPR 2006 and BMVC 2007. In 2009 he was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. In 1998, he became a fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the British Computer Society. He has been a member of the editorial boards of the journals IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, and Image and Vision Computing. In 2006, he was appointed as the founding editor-in-chief of the IET Computer Vision Journal. He has been conference chair for BMVC 1994, Track Chair for ICPR 2004 and Area Chair at ECCV 2006 and CVPR 2008, and in 1997 established the EMMCVPR workshop.