Olga Petrenko, researcher at the GILAB research group and member of the Institute of Informatics and Applications, obtained a PhD on 12 December. Her dissertation was supervised by Prof Mateu Sbert, director of GILAB, and Djamchid Ghazanfarpour, Professor of Informatics at Université de Limoges, and is entitled ‘Simulation of Flowering Plants’.

Mateu Sbert, director of the GILab, conducted a research stay at Yunnan University  in Kunming, China, on 24 – 29 November. During the stay Sbert delivered the talk ‘Informational Aesthetic Measures and the Evolution of Van Gogh’s Artwork’. The talk focused on the analysis of Van Gogh’s style using informational measures based on the entropy of the palette, the compressibility of the image, an information channel to capture the basic structure of the painting, and other entropy-based measures that take into account spatial information.

Alessandro Artusi, member of the GILAB, participated at the HDRi COST Action meeting which took place in Brno, Czech Republic, on 9 – 11 October. This action, with reference IC1005, brings together leading academic and industrial researchers and practitioners in Europe to propose a set of standards for Higy Dynamic Range imaging (HDRi) technologies. HDR improves digital imaging and photography because it captures, stores, transmits and displays real-world lighting.

Dr Alessandro Artusi is a Ramón y Cajal fellow at the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory and member of the HDRi Cost Action management committee.

Mateu Sbert, Director of GILAB, made a keynote speech at VRCAI 2014, the International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry. It was entitled ‘Advances in middle-ware and content creation tools for serious games’. The 13th edition of VRCAI, organised and sponsored by ACM-SIGGRAPH, took place in Shenzhen, China on 1 – 2 December. The event, provided an international forum for researchers, users and industry leaders in the field of Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC). Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC) emphasizes the consistence of virtual world and the real world. Spanning across next-generation info-communication environments like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). VRC is key in the way we define and interact, with and within, our virtual worlds.

Two research groups of the IIiA, eXiT and GILAB, are participating in BENEFIT, an international R&D project belonging to EUREKA’s ITEA3 cluster (ITEA3 label 13031). BENEFIT is led by Philips Healthcare and aims to improve patient stratification and treatment by quantifying and integrating pre-interventional and intra-interventional images and data into personalized models for workflow and Clinical Decision Support Systems. The Ministry for Industry, Energy and Tourism has given an award to the Spanish members of the consortium in the framework of its AEESD (Strategic Action for  Digital Economy and Society). The reference of the award is TSI-100103-2014-89. Joaquim Meléndez, co-director of eXiT, and Imma Boada, senior researcher at GILAB, will lead the IIiA’s participation in the project.

Anton Bardera, researcher at GILAB, participated at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2014. The event, the 21st in the series, took place at the CENIT Conference Center located in La Défense, Paris, on 27 – 30 October. Anton Bardera presented two posters: ‘Quantification of computed tomography pork carcass images’ and ‘Analysis of image informativeness measures’ . He is the first author of the first one while Màrius Vila, PhD student at GILAB, is the first author of the second one.

Anton Bardera is a member of the Graphics and Imging Laboratory and a lecturer at the University of Girona. He carries out research on image processing, scientific visualization, information theory and biomedical applications. Màrius Vila is a PhD student at the Graphics and Imging Laboratory. Under the supervision of Dr Mateu Sbert and Dr Miquel Feixas he is developing a PhD thesis on information theory applied to the analysis of digital documents and videos.

Roger Bramon, researcher of GILAB, has been awarded the University of Girona’s Extraordinary Doctoral Prize 2013. The prize is an acknowledgement of the quality of the PhD thesis he presented in July 2013. His thesis is entitled “Multimodal visualization based on Mutual Information” and was supervised by Imma Boada and Anton Bardera, senior researchers of GILAB. Roger Bramon received the prize on 16 September, at the official opening ceremony of the academic term 2014-2015.

Morgan & Clay Publishers, a prestigious scientific publisher, has released a book on information theory applied to image processing authored by several members of the GILAB research group. Miquel Feixas, Anton Bardera, Jaume Rigau and Mateu Sbert in collaboration with Qing Xu, a researcher at Tianjin University, China, are the authors of the book “Information Theory Tools for Image Processing”. The book, belongs to the Synthesis Lectures on Computer Graphics and Animation series.

IDIBGI, a public research centre in the field of biomedicine based in Girona, held its annual scientific conference in Sant Feliu de Guíxols on 11 July. Imma Boada member of GILab attended the event. GILab has a long track record of successful collaboration with Idibgi in the field of IT applied to medicine.

An article on LISSA, the serious game developed by GILAB to teach and learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation skills, has won the best article award at CTLT 2014. The Global Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology was hosted by Asia Pacific International Academy and took place in Singapore on 9 – 11 July. The winning article, entitled “LISSA: A Serious Game to Learn Automated External Defibrillators Use” was presented by Mateu Sbert, Director of GILAB, at the conference. LISSA’s intense academic activity is supplemented with exhibitions addressed to final users like hospitals. Imma Boada, senior researcher at GILAB, presented LISSA at Palamos Hospital. Her presentation was part of Enredadosensalud 2014, a workshop on educational tools for healthcare centres held by Unió Consorci Formació.