Claudio Oleari

On 23 January 2018, Claudio Oleari passed away at the age of 73 in Reggio Emilia. He was the last and ultimate authority on the OSA-UCS color space and perceptually uniform color.

He was an eminent physics scholar and an associate professor at the University of Parma, at the Department of Physics and Earth Sciences. He devoted his life to the activities of teaching with the same passion and interest that he dedicated to research in the context of color, applying physics to perception and establishing its role in colorimetry. In 1995 he started the Gruppo in Colorimetria e Reflectoscopia, which later became the Associazione Italiana Colore.

His availability for colleagues and students and his ability to listen and advise are proverbial: his kindness will always be remembered by everyone who has known him. These qualities are exemplified by the message on his profile at the University of Parma “You are welcome any day and at any time, even without an appointment. It is useful to verify by telephone my presence in the office. To book a meeting and ask questions, sent an email to claudio.oleari@fis.unipr.it.”

He initiated, within the Italiana Association, many valuable informational activities and forged many connections which persist as a rich bibliography, always having in mind the need to invest in research and training both in Italy and abroad.” He initiated, within the Italiana Association, many valuable informational activities and forged many connections which remain as a rich bibliography, always having in mind the need to invest in research and training both in Italy and abroad.

His death leaves a void difficult to fill, and the world of color loses an intellectual and an attentive and informed scholar.

Free Citizenship Workshop May 12

On May 12^th the International Rescue Committee (IRC) is holding a free citizenship workshop hosted at and supported by Airbnb HQ located at 888 Brannan St. in San Francisco. The event starts at 1:30pm and ends at 4:30pm. Flyers are available online: English Flyer & Spanish Flyer. There will be free food and each client will be offered a $10 Clipper Card to help with transportation.

At the workshop, clients will get help from IRC to apply for citizenship (submit the N-400), submit a fee waiver request (it’s $725 to apply otherwise), and prepare for the naturalization test. All cases will be reviewed, filed, and expertly managed by an IRC Department of Justice accredited legal representative who will serve as clients legal representatives with USCIS, alert clients to updates in their cases, and provide them advice throughout the entire process. All services are free and it’s open to the public. Registration is required, but folks can choose to register online at http://www.citizenshipSF.eventbrite.com or by phone at (408) 658-9206 or email Kayla.Ladd@Rescue.org. Lots of options!

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is an international non-profit organization founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein. IRC is at work in more than 40 countries and 28 U.S. cities and each year its programs serve 23 million people worldwide.

A new open forum for scientists working on color

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is setting up a new platform for scientific collaboration called Trellis. A key feature is that you can upload papers you want to discuss and anybody in the group can read the paper online: the AAAS takes care of all the copyright issues with the journal publisher. Another feature is that you can control how much noise you get from Trellis. Messages can have up to 2500 characters, but if you have longer text you can create a PDF and upload it like a paper. The same holds for images and videos.

Many AAAS members are teachers: if you do crowd-sourced experiments, you can easily find subjects. The AAAS is also involved in policy making in Washington, in case you need help with that. You can also announce conferences and other scientific events, and use the shared calendar.

Trellis is currently in pilot phase for educators, policy makers, and Section T of AAAS (Information, Computing, and Communication). There are still a few rough edges that are being ironed out. That might be why you have not yet heard of Trellis.

I am setting up a group called Computational Color Science in Section T. However, we are trying out something new. We are making it a completely open group, i.e., anybody with the URL can sign up and participate, without having to be an AAAS member. To join, go to http://www.trelliscience.com/color/. You can invite anybody else you want by giving them the URL and they can sign up.

Lou Silverstein

In the mid-80s, when we were building up the new digital color research area at PARC, we invited as many color scientists active in digital reproduction as we could. We had two motives: scope the field and identify potential candidates to hire.

One visitor stood out for his deep knowledge both in color vision science and in the mathematical modeling of reproduced color. With his tall slender figure he was immediately recognizable, and his soft voice was very determined in technical discussions. He also had a unique curriculum vitæ: he developed the avionics color displays for Honeywell and Boeing while never changing location; his employer would change, but his lab remained intact. While others were trying to characterize CRTs, he build a complete model for LCD displays; without him, we would not have high fidelity color LCD displays today.

Dr. Louis D. Silverstein has died at age 61. Farewell Lou!

Jean Gastinel's Memorial Service on 6/26/11

Jean passed away after a sudden tragic accident on 6/8/2011.

Jean's memorial service is on Sunday 6/26/11. The memorial service will be held at:

Valley Presbyterian Church
945 Portola Road
Portola Valley, CA 94028
Sunday, June 26, 2011 2:30 - 4:30 p.m.

AIC Newsletter 2010

The AIC Newsletter 2010 is now available online at http://www.aic-colour.org/news/news23-10.pdf.

Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications

IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging is the must attend event for all aspects of electronic imaging, including imaging systems, image processing, image quality, and algorithms. The Symposium Steering Committee, chaired by Sabine Süsstrunk, is starting a new exciting conference on Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications as part of the program track on Image Processing.

Or is it Aquamarine?

Dimitris (of colornaming.net), the delightful color naming print you sent arrived. It got here a while ago but this post is overdue - thanks for the print.

Color Imaging XVI: Call for Papers

The 2011 SPIE/IST Electronic Imaging Conference has posted calls for papers on the conference web site. As a memeber of the program commitee of the Color Imaging XVI: Displaying, Hardcopy, Processing, and Applications conference, please consider submitting a color imaging related abstract.

The conferences will be held 23 - 27 January 2011 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel in San Francisco, CA.

The dues date for abstract (500 words) and summaries (200 words) is 28 June 2010.

CIE Division 8 Meeting Agenda and 2010 Activity Report

The agenda for the upcoming March 15, 2010 meeting of Division 8 of the CIE has been posted to the Division 8 web site (under What's New). In addition, the 2010 annual activity report has been uploaded. This division of the CIE has the terms of reference: "To study procedures and prepare guides and standards for the optical, visual and metrological aspects of the communication, processing, and reproduction of images, using all types of analogue and digital imaging devices, storage media, and imaging media." So if you will be attending the upcoming CIE meeting in Vienna or have in interest in it's activities these documents may be of interest.

Seminar on the Spectral Sudoku of Halftone Dots

Today at 4 pm Eastern Time Dr. J. A. Stephen Viggiano will present a seminar at the Ceneter for Imaging Science at RIT. The seminar is entitled: "Spectral Sudoku of Halftone Dots: The New Math Catches Up Wth Print Color".

The abstract is intriguing:

"When the colors that come of a printer don't resemble what's displayed on the monitor, better prediction of print color may be needed. These models are also useful for simulating the system, even before it can be built. Paradigms for color print modeling will be examined and classified. Challenges will also be discussed.

Modern algebra provides a link between a popular puzzle and the colors produced by printers. One of the modeling paradigms uses Hilbert-like spaces where, depending on the image microstructure, vector addition may or may not hold. Other models derived include a class that account for multiple scatter. The latter are spatial generalizations of the Kubelka-Munk model."

Real-time viewing of the seminar will be available online: https://connect.rit.edu/cis_seminar/.

Color Measurement Webinar from the Printing Applications Laboratory at RIT

On February 11th from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm EST, the Printing Applications Laboratory of RIT will offer a free webinar on Assessing Color Measurement Instrument Capability. The webinar to be given by Robert Chung is described as follows:

"Color management depends on printing process control. Printing process control begins with color measurement. This beginner-level webinar will define a number of important concepts (e.g., calibration, calibration reference materials, tristimulus integration, colorimetric parameters (L*, a*, b*, C*, h, ∆H, ∆E), accuracy, precision, reproducibility, and inter-instrument agreement), and elaborate on these concepts with process control examples in the graphic arts. Participants will become more aware and knowledgeable when using spectrocolorimeters for press/proofer profiling and printing process control."

More details about this (and other upcoming webinars), including a link to the registration page is here.

18th Color Imaging Conference - Call for Papers

The IS&T and SID have released the call for papers for the 18th Color Imaging Conference.



This year the conference will be held from November 8 to 12, 2010 in San Antonio, Texas.

Conference General Co-Chairs Francisco Imai and Erno Langendijk write:

"The conference committee is constantly seeking to bring new topics to CIC and this year we would like to promote the special topics of color in computer graphics and color in medical imaging. Color in computer graphics presents challenging issues involving material appearance, video, capture, 3D, and perception. Color in medical imaging involves questions related to color appearance in dentistry, color formulation in prosthetic materials, and data visualization problems. Besides the color research areas covered by CIC, such as color perception, theory, capture, display, printing, and workflow, CIC encourages submissions in these two new fields."

Abstracts are due April 12, 2010.

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Categorization

The Print Production Automation Laboratory of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California is seeking candidates for an ASEE/NSF postdoctoral fellowship in computational categorization in the area of color imaging. A brief description of this opportunity has been posted to the ASEE/NSF web site.



The position will apply experience and interests in perceptual categorization, machine learning, statistical pattern recognition, and natural computation to a sizeable, diverse and growing collection of laboratory and web-derived ground truthing databases for color imaging. Join a team working on advanced optical feedback for commercial printing and provide knowledge of multi-variate clustering, to implement software to perform computational categorization.

Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology

A quick announcement about a new color related project - the Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. This major reference work about color in color will be published by Springer and I will be busy as the editor-in-chief. The first sample entry has been completed and is available on the project web site. It's an entry on CIECAM02.



The effort thus far has given me a new appreciation for indexing. As Harman(1) states of indexing: "the second key decision for any indexing is the choice of what constitutes a word and, then, which of these words to index." Stay tuned.

(1) D. Harman, Challenges in Indexing Electronic Text and Images, ASIS Monograph, Medford NJ, p. 249 (1994).

CGIV'10 Submission Deadline

The Society for Imaging Science and Technology has sent out reminders that the deadline for submissions to the Fifth European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision is coming up November 19, 2009.

From the General Chairs Jussi Parkkinen and Timo Jääskeläinen and Program Chairs Theo Gevers and Alain Tremeau comes the call:

The program committee is currently soliciting high-quality submissions from researchers working in a broad range of colour related fields from industry, academia, and national and international standards communities. Conference topics—listed in detail inside this Call— include colour science, computational colour, colour in computer graphics, colour reproduction, colour vision/psychophysics, colour image quality, colour image processing, and multispectral colour science. CGIV2010 will include oral paper presentations, poster sessions, exciting workshops—a new feature (see inside)—and an industry exhibit. As in years past, submissions will be subject to a rigorous peer review. Technical Chairs for each specific area will lead a group of technical experts who will conduct the rigorous review.

The conference will take place June 14-18, 2010 in Joensuu, Finland. The conference will be held in conjunction with MCS’10, the 12th International Symposium on Multispectral Colour Science.

For the full call for papers see: here.

Journal of Vision Call for Papers: Perception of surface color and material properties

The Journal Vision has sent out a call for papers for a special issue on the perception of surface color and material properties. Guest editors David Brainard and Larry Maloney describe the intent of the issue as follows:

"Researchers have devoted much effort to understanding the perception of color and lightness for simple stimulus configurations, often consisting of flat matte surfaces rendered under diffuse illuminations, or simulations thereof. The objects we look at in daily viewing, on the other hand, are rarely flat, matte, or diffusely illuminated. There is now considerable interest in pushing our understanding into the realm of more complex, three-dimensional scenes, spurred in part by advances in computer graphics that allow physically accurate rendering of a variety of materials and thus permit exploration of interactions between object shape and orientation, object material, and illumination geometry. The Journal of Vision plans a Special Issue to bring together papers that describe recent advances in this area."

The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2010. For more details about this special issue see the call for papers: here.

MCSL Post-Doc in Image-Base 3D Modeling of Fine Art

The Munsell Color Science Laboratory of RIT has announced a two year post-doc in the area of image-based 3D modeling of fine art. The principle researchers are Dr Roy Berns and Dr Jim Ferwerda and the project will include extended residencies at MOMA in New York. I may be biased but this sounds like an oustanding research opportunity: 3D spectral capture in NYC with Roy and Jim! The full project description is:

"The Munsell Color Science Laboratory (MCSL) at RIT is seeking an outstanding researcher for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the area of Image-Based 3D Modeling of Fine Art. The goal of the research is to develop advanced methods for creating rich digital representations of paintings and other cultural heritage objects that can serve as surrogates for archiving, analysis, restoration, reproduction, and scholarship. The fellowship is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of a project entitled “Improving Artwork Reproduction through 3D-Spectral Capture and Computer Graphics Rendering”. Research resources of the MCSL include a light measurement laboratory, a custom imaging goniospectrophotometer, a computer cluster, and calibrated spectral printing, display systems, and visual psychophysics laboratories. In addition to research at the MCSL in Rochester NY, the appointment will include extended residencies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City."

For more information please refer to the opening announcement: here.

William Schreiber (1925-2009)

I received an email that MIT imaging professor William Schreiber has passed away. His full obituary is available here. I appreciate that it includes some of his Schreiber-isms:

"You get to do one big thing every 10 years in your career;" "HDTV is not about television; it's about jobs;" "MIT engineers should be building bridges;" and "There is no reason to be mean to a student."

Truely an innovator in the field of imaging and color.

Galilean Nights

The 400^th anniversary of Galileo's telescopic observations is rapidly approaching. Next week, on 22-24 October 2009, the International Year of Astronomy 2009 Cornerstone Project Galilean Nights is coordinating local public astonomical observing events to share the wonders of heaven with your community. For more information visit http://www.galileannights.org/.