The Doctoral Consortium (DC) provides a forum for PhD students to present and discuss their research. It enables participants to receive feedback from experienced researchers, exchange ideas with peers, and refine their research questions, methodology, and research plans. Each doctoral student is paired with one or more mentors who provide guidance and feedback throughout the consortium.
The Doctoral Consortium consists of two complementary sessions. The first is a Pitch Session, which opens with a keynote address by Josep Lladós, who will share his perspective on conducting research and offer practical advice for doctoral students. Following the keynote, each PhD student delivers a three-minute presentation introducing their research question and current progress.
The second is the Poster Session, where PhD students present and discuss their research. This interactive session allows participants to engage with conference attendees, mentors, and fellow doctoral students through questions and discussions, helping them refine their ideas and consider different perspectives on their research.
To recognize the quality of the presentations and discussions, a Best Doctoral Consortium Presentation Award will be presented during the conference closing session.
Dates
- Monday, August 31, from 15:40 to 16:40: Keynote Speaker + Pitch Session
- Wednesday, September 2, from 13:20 to 15:00: Poster Session
- Wednesday, September 2, at 16:40: Award Presentation during the closing session
Participants
The following PhD students have been selected to participate in the Doctoral Consortium. Their research topics and assigned mentor(s) are listed below.
DC.1 — Some Aspects of Optical Music Recognition from Scanned Documents for Immersive Music Learning
Speaker: Ankit Sinha
Supervisors: Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay and Rahul Kumar Ray, FLAME University, Pune, Maharashtra, India
Mentor: Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
DC.2 — Multimodal Information Extraction from Visually Rich Documents in Domain-Specific and Multilingual Settings
Speaker: Catyana Heyne
Supervisors: Jürgen Frikel and Filippo Riccio, OTH Regensburg, Germany
Mentor: Nicholas Howe, Smith College, USA
DC.3 — Beyond Text and Pixels: Spatial Reasoning for Manuscript Exploration
Speaker: Jan-Frederik Stock
Supervisors: Hussein Mohammed and Frank Steinicke, Visual Manuscript Analysis Lab, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, Germany
Mentor: Jean-Christophe Burie, University of La Rochelle, France
DC.4 — An Evaluation Framework for Automatic Text Recognition of Historical Documents
Speaker: Mirjam Cuper
Supervisors: Cynthia Liem and Julián Urbano, TU Delft, the Netherlands, and KB, the National Library of the Netherlands
Mentor: Mickael Coustaty, University of La Rochelle, France
DC.5 — Agentic Systems for Complex Document Understanding
Speaker: Olivier D’Ancona
Supervisors: Andreas Fischer and Anna Scius-Bertrand, University of Fribourg and University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland
Additional Supervisor: Momina Moetesum, SEECS, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan
DC.6 — From Pixels to Data: Deep Learning for Understanding Information Visualizations
Speaker: Poonam Poonam
Supervisor: Timo Ropinski, Ulm University, Germany
Mentor: Andreas Fischer, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
DC.7 — High-Level Retrieval from Historical Document Collections: From OCR to Evidence-Grounded Findings
Speaker: Seth Stewart
Supervisor: David Wingate, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA
Mentor: Vincent Christlein, University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, Germany
DC.8 — Deep Learning for Low-Resource Cursive Scripts: Advancing Urdu–Pashto Handwritten Text Recognition
Speaker: Syed Yaqub Shah
Supervisor: Robert Sablatnig, Computer Vision Lab, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria
Mentor: Faisal Shafait, SEECS, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan
DC.9 — Combining Images and Graph Neural Networks
Speaker: Tim Hallyburton
Supervisor: Gernot Fink, TU Dortmund, Germany
Mentor: Josep Lladós, Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
DC.10 — Distributed Cognitive Architectures: From Biological Foundations to Formal Convergence Theory and Operational Validation
Speaker: Welf Wustlich
Supervisor: Thomas Martinetz, Institute for Neural and Bioinformatics, University of Lübeck, Germany
Mentor: Silvia Cascianelli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy