2nd International Conference on Visual Information Systems VISUAL'97 15-17 December 1997 Sea Lodge Hotel, San Diego, California, USA (Postscript version of the Visual '97 CFP is available from: http://vision.ucsd.edu/visual97/call.ps.Z) Present day information systems are mainly based on alphanumeric information. The effective use of visual information for organizational applications has been limited and mostly confined to highly specialized applications. Visual information systems (VIS) will not only substantially enhance the value and usability of existing information, but will also open up a new horizon of previously untapped information sources. Future information systems in commercial and scientific applications will have a high visual content, and it is necessary to integrate the visual and image components into the architecture of o rganizational information systems. It is expected that VIS will supersede existing Information Systems, while maintaining all the strengths and fulfilling all the functions of the latter. Although there has always been a demand for visual information, th e technology for such systems were either insufficiently mature or unavailable in the past. VIS is now becoming increasingly feasible because of rapid advances in hardware and software technologies. The construction of VIS represents a radical departure from building conventional systems, and many novel, fundamental, and architectural issues will need to be addressed. The conference will focus attention on the application and management of visual inf ormation and will include, but is not restricted to, the following topics: * Visual information systems paradigms and architecture * Content-based indexing, search and retrieval * Image databases * Visual data modelling and integration * Memory organization, management and storage models * Feature (invariant) recognition and content extraction * Picture description, representation and indexing languages * Query models, paradigms, and languages for visual information retrieval * Image query processing and optimization * Support environment for visual information systems implementation * Integration of visual and non-visual information * Parallel processing in visual information systems * Image crawling and the net * Authoring image information presentations * Compression and delivery of visual information * Specific applications areas of visual information systems Both work in progress as well as fully developed systems will be of interest to the conference. The conference is organized in cooperation with the University of Aizu, University of California, San Diego, University of Pittsburgh, and Victoria University of Technology. PAPER SUBMISSION Intending authors are requested to fill in the Pre-submission interest form at http://vision.ucsd.edu/visual97/interest.html. Authors should submit three copies of full paper of no more than 25 double-spaced pages by 1 April 1997 to the Program Chair: Ramesh Jain Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0407 The first page should include the authors' names, affiliation, telephone and fax numbers, postal and email addresses and an abstract. Authors are encouraged to submit the papers electronically in Postscript form (see the Instructions for Authors at http://vision.ucsd.edu/visual97/authors.html). Papers will be reviewed internationally. Detailed instructions for manuscript preparation will be sent at the time of acceptance notification, and will also be available from the Web page. Accepted papers must be presented at the Conference with the presenting author registering as a delegate in order for the paper to be included in the proceedings. Conference proceedings will be published and distributed to participants at the conference. It is also planned to publish the papers in book form after the conference. IMPORTANT DATES Papers due: 1 April 1997 Notification of acceptance: 1 July 1997 Camera ready paper due: 1 September 1997 Conference: 15-17 December 1997 GENERAL CHAIR Shi-Kuo Chang, University of Pittsburgh, USA E-mail: chang@cs.pitt.edu GENERAL CO-CHAIRS Tosiyasu Kunii, University of Aizu, Japan E-mail: kunii@u-aizu.ac.jp Erich Neuhold, T.H. Darmstadt & GMD-IPSI, Germany E-mail: neuhold@darmstadt.gmd.de PROGRAM CHAIR Ramesh Jain, University of California, San Diego, California, USA E-mail: jain@ece.ucsd.edu PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Clement Leung, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia E-mail: clement@matilda.vut.edu.au Arnold Smeulders, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: smeulders@wins.uva.nl PROGRAM COMMITTEE Alberto Del Bimbo, Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy Christos Faloutsos, University of Maryland, USA Athula Ginige, University of Technology Sydney, Australia William Grosky, Wayne State University, USA Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, UK Yannis Ioannidis, University of Wisconsin, USA Horace Ip, City University, Hong Kong Rangachar Kasturi, Pennsylvania State University, USA Robert Laurini, INSA-Lyon, France Kingsley Nwosu, Lucent Technologies, USA S. Panchanathan, University of Ottawa, Canada Dragutin Petkovich, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA Amit P. Sheth, University of Georgia, USA Ishwar K. Sethi, Wayne State University, USA Masao Sakauchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Stephen Smoliar, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, USA Wu Jian Kang, National University of Singapore, Singapore Further information and updates are available on the World Wide Web at: http://vision.ucsd.edu/visual97/ or by contacting: Visual '97 Conference Secretariat c/o Ms. Edna Nerona Department of Electrical Engineering University of California San Diego, California, USA E-mail: nerona@ece.ucsd.edu The conference is organized in cooperation with the IEEE (approval pending) and the ACM (approval pending), and TC12 for multi-media information processing of the IAPR (approval pending).