The Technical Committee on Statistical Pattern Recognition Techniques (TC1) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition assigns the Pierre Devijver Award at the biannual S+SSPR workshop. The award commemorates Pierre Devijver, who was one of the founding pioneers of statistical pattern recognition (see a list of past winners here).

We call for nominations of candidates for the 2026 award. The lecture will be presented during S+SSPR 2026, the IAPR Joint International Workshops on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SPR 2026) and Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (SSPR 2026), to be held in Bern, Switzerland, from 24th to 26th August 2026. The winner will be expected to deliver the Pierre Devijver Award Lecture in person during the workshop.

We invite nominations of outstanding candidates for the award, to be selected from among leading scientists who have made significant contributions to the field of statistical pattern recognition and closely related areas. The award committee, composed of previous Pierre Devijver Award recipients, will evaluate the nominations, and select the awardee.

Please send the names of your nominees by email to the TC1 Chair at kostas.sechidis [at] novartis.com, with a maximum of two nominations per nominator, using [IAPR-TC1-PDA] as the subject line. The deadline for submissions is 28 February 2026.

We are looking forward to receiving a strong set of nominees.

The IAPR TC1 Board

Konstantinos Sechidis and Maura Pintor