Laurence Likforman-Sulem honoured at ICPRAI 2026 (Pattern Recognition & AI)

10 July 2026

Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Associate Professor at Télécom Paris, was invited as a keynote speaker at ICPRAI 2026 (International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence), held in Montreal.

During the event, she received the Pattern Recognition Award from Professor Ching Suen of Concordia University on June 24, 2026, for her keynote lecture titled: From Handwriting to Byzantine Engraved Characters: A Deep Learning Journey Filled with Emotions.

In her talk, Laurence Likforman-Sulem traced the history of handwriting analysis and recognition, from traditional machine learning approaches to modern deep learning techniques. She highlighted the diverse applications of these technologies, including text line extraction, handwritten character recognition, Arabic word recognition, and writer identification. Her work also extends to historical documents, such as the reading of medieval Byzantine seals.

A significant part of her research focuses on online handwriting analysis to detect emotions (anxiety, stress, depression) or pathologies like Parkinson’s disease. Additionally, she addressed the challenges of collecting data available on the Web, particularly in the field of digital humanities.