Invited Talk 1 (Nov. 29, 2022)

Cutting Edge Technologies for On-Drone Voice-Based Victim Searching in Disaster-Stricken Areas
Prof. Chinthaka Premachandra
Professor, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan

Abstract: Victim Searching activities using drones at disaster-stricken areas have been mainly conducted by analyzing images captured by the on-drone cameras. But, depending on the victim's locations, they may not be able to captures to the camera images, such as being covered in sediment and debris.Therefore, as a method of searching for victims who are not captured by on-drone cameras, a method of finding the location of the victim by mounting a voice-based system on a drone and extracting the human voices from the collected sound by the system is being studied.This talk will discuss latest research findings regarding the disaster victim searching by voice processing and related drone automation technologies that are necessary for the searching activities.
Bio: Chinthaka Premachandra (Senior Member, IEEE) was born in Sri Lanka. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Mie University, Tsu, Japan, in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, in 2011. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Chinthaka Premachandra was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan. From 2016-2022 he was an assistant/associate professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. In 2022, he was promoted to Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, where he is currently the Manager of the Image Processing and Robotic Laboratory. His research interests include AI, UAV, Image processing, Audio processing, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), Mobile Robotics. In addition to IEEE, Dr. Premachandra is also a member of IEICE, Japan; SICE, Japan; RSJ, Japan; and SOFT, Japan. He received the IEEE Sensors Letters Best Paper Award from the IEEE Sensors Council in 2022, and IEEE Japan medal from the IEEE Tokyo section in 2022. He also received the FIT Best Paper Award and the FIT Young Researchers Award from IEICE and IPSJ, Japan, in 2009 and 2010, respectively. He has served many international conferences and journals as a Steering Committee Member and an Editor, respectively. He is currently serving as an associate editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters(R-AL) and IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems. He is the Founding Chair of the International Conference on Image Processing and Robotics (ICIPRoB) which is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE.

Plenary Talk 2 (Nov. 29, 2022)

Invitation for AI/ML in Software as a Medical Device: Fundamentals of Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Medical Images
Prof. Syoji Kobashi
Director, Advanced Medical Engineering Research Institute, University of Hyogo, Japan

Abstract: Software as a medical device, SaMD in short, is attracting great attention with the recent advances of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). SaMD is defined as "software intended to be used for one ore more medical purposes that perform these purposes without being part of a hardware medical device," by International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF). Especially, in the radiology department, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) will support radiologists to interpret the medical images such as MRI, CT, X-ray. The CAD will detect lesions, predict diseases, and/or quantify from medical images with utilizing AI/ML, image processing, and statistical analysis, etc. This talk will briefly introduce SaMD, and fundamentals of CAD for medical images, and some applications.
Bio: Syoji Kobashi received BE in 1995, ME in 1997, and Doctor of Engineering in 2000, all from Himeji institute of Technology. He was an assistant professor at Himeji Institute of Technology (2000-2004), an associate professor (2005-2016), and currently a professor (2016-), University of Hyogo. He has serving on the manager of advanced medical engineering research center (2016-2021), and, the director of advanced medical engineering research institute, University of Hyogo. And, he was a guest associate professor at Osaka University, WPI immunology frontier research center (2010-2016), and was a visiting scholar at University of Pennsylvania (2011-2012), and a specially appointed director, National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center (2021-). His research interests include medical image understanding and artificial intelligence. He received 16 international awards, including Lifetime Achievement Award (WAC, 2016), Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award (IEEE-SMCS, 2009). He has been serving on Program Chair of WAC2022, and many others. Moreover, he is an editor-at-large of Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing journal, an editor-in-chief of International Journal of Biomedical Soft Computing and Human Sciences, etc. He is the senior member of IEEE.