Conference report: ICDAR '97

The Ninth Conference took place August 27-29, 2007 in the rarefied atmosphere of the Shangri-La Hotel in Katmandu. It attracted 2740 participants, including 2480 tele-attendants. The program committee selected 185 papers from 640 submissions. Thirty were presented live on-site. The three invited speakers gave cautiously optimistic assessments of the direction and momentum of the discipline. The president of the IAPR presented several awards for distinguished service or contributions, but one of the customary prizes was again withheld for lack of a meritorious nomination. The thirty-two sessions were grouped according td nine major themes: Text Recognition, Graphics, De. vices, Data Mining and Warehousing, Sublimation, Oral Documents, Docunets, Epistechnology, and History of OCR/DIA. The significant paradigm shifts of the last decade are reflected in the distribution of topics.