AVA Awards Recipients Report - Tim Dixon - 2007

Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Award

The Applied Vision Association awarded me the Geoffrey G Burton Memorial Award of £500 towards the costs of my attendance at the Vision Sciences Society 7th Annual Meeting in Sarasota, Florida, 11-16 May 2007.

The Vision Sciences Society (VSS) annual meeting brings together researchers from a broad range of disciplines that contribute to vision science; including visual psychophysics, neuroscience, computational vision and cognitive psychology.

This year's meeting had over 1600 registrants with approximately 200 talks and 900 poster presentations. In addition to the main programme, there was a half day of satellite workshops, a keynote address by Dr. Larry Abbott, Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Columbia University School of Medicine, and a demo night at the local science museum.

I presented a poster (Tim Dixon, Eduardo Canga, Stavri Nikolov, Tom Troscianko, Jan Noyes, Dave Bull, Nishan Canagarajah; Solider direction and soldier location: Image fusion and compression in two scene perception tasks) in a session entitled ‘Scene perception.’ This poster presented two novel experiments testing image fusion methodologies in surveillance scenarios. The four and a half hours given to presenting my poster allowed for several valuable contacts to be made and discussions to be had, helping further my work and influencing the writing of my thesis that is currently in progress.

As well as presenting my poster, I was a co-author on an oral presentation by Prof. Tom Troscianko (Tom Troscianko, Nick Mourkoussis, Fiona Rivera, Katerina Mania, Tim Dixon, Rycharde Hawkes; Memory for objects in virtual environments). I also attended many poster sessions on a range of areas, and interesting talks on the following topics: visual organisation and computation; natural scene understanding; attention; spatial vision; motion mechanisms; and colour and luminance.

VSS has an international reputation as a platform for presenting up-to-date experimental findings in the multi-disciplinary field of vision science; as such it was the ideal conference to attend as a final year PhD student. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Applied Vision Association for enabling me to present a poster at this exciting conference.