The Digital Image

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The Digital Image, an interdisciplinary symposium from the Oxford e-Research Centre, took place on Friday 16th March.

David Shotton had the brilliant idea to bring together Oxford academics who have interests in or are actively working with digital image data, across all disciplines. We described existing projects and activities, discussed state-of-the-art digital imaging and image processing techniques, talked about common interests concerning the description of images and knowledge extraction from digital image resources. It fell on me to present a philosophical view of digital images today. I talked mainly about avatars in Second Life.

I should say that, as a member of the audience, the meeting was a fantastic success. I personally felt that I learnt more during that symposium than by attending so many boring conferences. The thing is that the speakers made a real effort not only to talk about digital images but also about their own fields in a way that was informative and accessible to non-experts. Fascinating.

The interesting thing was also to discover how many common issues we all face when dealing with digital tools and artefacts. As David wrote:

"The symposium is organized in the belief that academics in the sciences, arts and humanities face common challenges and opportunities in the field of digital imaging, and that by breaking down artificial barriers between academic disciplines we will discover similar interests and forge common research agendas across traditionally separate domains."

Absolutely right.

The list of speakers included:
Professor Martin Kemp, History of Art - Seen | Unseen: visualisation in art and science
Professor Philip Torr, Oxford Brookes - Computer vision for films, games and other media
Professor Irene Tracey, FMRIB Centre - Imaging live patients
Professor Donna Kurtz, Beazley Archive - The artefact and the image in Classical Studies
Professor David Cockayne, Materials - Seeing the nanoworld
Professor Alan Bowman, Classics - Imaging ancient documents
Dr Mark Fricker, Plant Sciences - Visualizing biological molecules
Professor Adrian Thomas, Zoology - Visualizing flight
Professor Dennis Noble, Physiology - Modelling the human heart
Professor Luciano Floridi¸ Philosophy - The image, the virtual and the real
Dr David Shotton, OeRC and Zoology - Image semantics and image sharing

You can now watch some of the presentations online.

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