JOINT IAPR INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOPS ON Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (SSPR 2006) and Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SPR 2006) August 17-19, 2006 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China Web site: http://www.ssspr.org/2006/ Paper submission deadline: January 31, 2006 The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and its Technical Committees on Statistical Pattern Recognition (TC1) and Structural and Syntactical Pattern Recognition (TC2) will organize the next joint workshops at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) prior to ICPR 2006 which will also be held in Hong Kong. The joint workshops aim at promoting interaction and collaboration not only among researchers working directly in areas covered by TC1 and TC2 but also among those in other fields who use statistical, structural or syntactical techniques extensively. We welcome mathematicians, statisticians, researchers in machine learning and practitioners alike who, at present, work outside the pattern recognition community. SSPR Topics: Structural matching; Syntactic pattern recognition; Image understanding; Shape analysis; Graphical models; Graph-based methods; Spectral methods for graph-based representations; Probabilistic and stochastic structural models for PR; Structural learning in spatial or spatio-temporal signals; Kernel methods for structured data; Image and video analysis; Intelligent sensing systems; Spatio-temporal pattern recognition; SSPR methods in computer vision; Multimedia signal analysis; Image document analysis; Structured text analysis and understanding; Novel applications SPR Topics: Density estimation; Large margin classifiers; Kernel methods; Ensemble methods and multiple classifiers; Bayesian methods; Gaussian processes; Dimensionality reduction; Independent component analysis; Cluster analysis and unsupervised learning; Data visualization; Semi-supervised learning; Model selection; Hybrid methods; Comparative studies; Speech and image analysis; Novel applications The workshops will comprise of invited talks, oral and poster presentations, and panel discussions. In addition, the SSPR workshop will have a special session called Graph Based Methods in Structural Pattern Recognition co-organized by the Technical Committee on Graph Based Representations (TC15). Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings which will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (http://www.springeronline.com/lncs), and will be distributed to all participants during the workshops.