We invite researchers to develop Video Quality Enhancement models that improve lighting, color, sharpness, and reduce noise in video calls – thereby giving a professional studio-like effect. We provide participants with a differentiable Video Quality Assessment model, training and test videos. The participants submit enhanced videos which will be evaluated in our crowdsourced framework.
Registration is open. Checkout our website for details: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/ntire-2025-vqe/
Thank you
Call for Competition on text line segmentation: FEST @ ICDAR 2025
February 4th, 2025 
Daniela Lopez de Luise ===================================
CALL FOR COMPETITION: FEST @ ICDAR 2025
Competition on few-shot text line segmentation
https://ai4ch.uniud.it/FESTcompICDAR25/
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We are glad to announce FEST: Competition on FEw-Shot Text line segmentation of ancient handwritten documents (FEST), in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR 2025.
Competition Overview:
Text line segmentation is a crucial component of Document Image Analysis, particularly for ancient handwritten documents. It directly influences subsequent tasks like optical character recognition, layout analysis, and information extraction.
This competition challenges participants to develop systems capable of segmenting text lines using only three annotated images per manuscript for training. The dataset features a diverse collection of ancient manuscripts with varying layouts, levels of degradation, and non-standard formatting, reflecting real-world complexities. By focusing on few-shot learning, this competition aims to encourage the development of methods that can be readily applied by humanities scholars without the need for extensive manual annotation, fostering broader adoption of automated document analysis tools.
Competition Tasks:
We challenge the participants to perform the task of textline segmentation on the proposed dataset, U-DIADS-TL, in a few-shot setting, providing only three images, with their corresponding ground truths, as the training set for each of the three manuscripts comprising it.
Important Dates:
· Registration Open: 10 December, 2024
· Test set release to participants: 7 April, 2025
· Deadline of the Competition: 20 April, 2025
· Winner announcement: 30 June, 2025
For any additional information, please visit the website: https://ai4ch.uniud.it/FESTcompICDAR25/
CfP: Eye Movements in Programming (EMIP 2025)
February 4th, 2025 Daniela Lopez de Luise We are inviting contributions to the Thirteenth International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming 2025, which will be held at the end of May 2025. It is co-located with the 2025 ACM Symposium of Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA) in Tokyo, Japan.
• Submission deadline for papers: February 24th, 2025 (AoE)
• Notification to authors: March 21st, 2025
• Camera-ready deadline: March 31st, 2025 (AoE)
• Workshop: End of May, 2025
ELLIS workshop on Representation Learning and Generative Models for Structured Data
February 4th, 2025 Daniela Lopez de Luise
To start the year well, I'm excited to announce the first TRL-like gathering on the European continent on 27 Feb in Amsterdam: the ELLIS workshop on Representation Learning and Generative Models for Structured Data! Here, we'll bring together researchers in NLP, ML, DB, and IR disciplines. Find more info at: https://sites.google.com/view/rl-and-gm-for-sd/home
Submissions:
- format: extended abstract of 2 pages
- openreview: https://openreview.net/group?id=ELLIS.eu/2024/Workshop/RLGMSD
- deadline: 31 January
Talks:
- Julian Eisenschlos (Google DeepMind)
- Frank Hutter (University of Freiburg / ELLIS Institute Tübingen)
- Pasquale Minervini (University of Edinburgh)
- Vaishali Pal (University of Amsterdam)
- Paolo Papotti (Eurecom)
Organizers:
- Iacer Calixto (Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam)
- Michael Cochez (VU Amsterdam)
- Madelon Hulsebos (CWI Amsterdam)
- Andrew Yates (University of Amsterdam)
Sponsors:
- ELLIS unit Amsterdam
- SAP
Looking forward to seeing some of you in Amsterdam! Attendance is free, but please make sure to register/apply soon: https://forms.gle/z27pzg1nLuQxhxH86
On behalf of the organisers,
Member of the ACL and the ELLIS Society.
CFP: 1st International Workshop on Web3 Applications and the eVolution of dEcentralized finance (WAVE) 2025 @ IEEE ISCC 2025
February 4th, 2025 Daniela Lopez de Luise 2-5 July 2025, Bologna, Italy
Accepted papers will be published by IEEE and will be available via the IEEE Xplore.
Motivation and Rationale
Web3 and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) are two key factors of the new Internet era. They are redefining the landscape of digital communications and distributed systems, offering new opportunities for secure, resilient, and scalable applications. The worldwide adoption of Web3 is reshaping how users experience Internet services by including concepts such as decentralization, democratization and rewarding in existing services. The main engine of Web3 is blockchain technology. However, there are numerous areas where there is room for improvement.
To begin with, most Web3 applications revolve around DeFi, however, the decentralisation offered by blockchain technology could help plenty of scenarios. Promising scenarios are supply chains, health, decentralized storage, data sharing, power grids, virtual worlds (like the Metaverse) and many more. Additionally, there are other scenarios where Web3 could have a meaningful impact, including IoT, vehicular networks, cloud and edge computing, digital identities, intellectual property management, digital twins, and integration with the physical world. DeFi is still quite far from perfect. Indeed, fungible and non-fungible assets are constantly evolving to include more advanced functionalities as so to increase their adoption. Moreover, DeFi was shown to be susceptible to malicious activity, including fake NFTs, sleepminting, washtrading, rug pull, pump and dump, Maximal Extractable Value and other scams. Finding solutions to foresee and prevent such malevolent practices becomes crucial for the true adoption of this technology. Lastly, blockchain technology has some inherent limitations that are still to be addressed, including creating efficient consensus protocols for public blockchains, and secure channels for transaction confirmation among others.
The Web3 Applications and the eVolution of dEcentralized finance (WAVE) workshop analyses the technological challenges and the potential of Web3 and DeFi applications. By bringing together researchers and practitioners, the workshop aims to attract contributions that can discuss how these emerging technologies can shape the future of blockchain, and address the challenges of their adoption. Papers on both theoretical and design aspects are welcomed, which describe and evaluate novel design methods and system prototypes. The workshop also welcomes work-in-progress and position papers.
Topics
We welcome submission on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:
Web3 Applications and Technologies
Web3 storage decentralization and data sharing
Novel Web3 applications (IoT, networks, cloud computing)
DLTs and Blockchain Technology
Blockchain security and performance
Adoption of blockchain in innovative scenarios
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and similars (e.g. GameFi, SocialFi)
Application of DeFi to novel scenarios
DeFi vulnerability identification and mitigation
New DeFi services
Decentralized Social Networking: analysis and applications
Decentralized Technology for the Metaverse
NFTs analysis and applications
AI for Web3 and DeFi
Privacy, scalability, and governance
Networking and communications for Web3 and DeFi
Solutions for safe online environments
Submission
Submissions will be made via EDAS using the following link: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=33279.
Note that accepted papers of up to 6 pages will be published with no additional charge. Exceeding pages will be charged an additional fee. Papers exceeding 7 pages will not be accepted. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register to the conference and present the paper. Only registered and presented papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Accepted papers will be included in the ISCC 2025 proceedings and will be submitted for inclusion to IEEE Xplore. The ISCC proceedings have been indexed in the past by ISI, DBLP and Scopus. This makes the ISCC conference one of the publication venues with very high visibility and impact in both Computer and Communications areas.
Important Dates
Papers submission: [Extended Deadline] February 10, 2025 (AoE, UCT -12)
Notification of acceptance: March 14, 2025
Camera-ready paper due: April 14, 2025
Workshop: July 2-5, 2025 (tbc)