I was awarded the Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Award to attend the 25th Symposium of the International Colour Vision Society held in Riga, Latvia from 5-9 July, 2019. ICVS holds biennial symposiums organised by colleagues for colleagues and in 2019 attracted 167 physiologists, psychologists, physicists, geneticists, optometrists, ophthalmologists and visual scientists from 19 countries.
Although I have attended numerous national and international conferences on colour research and applications, this was my first ICVS symposium. From walking through the doors in the morning of the very first day, I entered a comfortable learning space where enthusiastic colleagues shared their knowledge in the many aspects of colour vision and colour vision deficiencies that challenged and strengthened my understanding of the field. The social activities were also very enjoyable with many opportunities to meet with old and new colleagues and to network with my peers in a friendly atmosphere.
I gave an oral talk entitled Mapping Colour Names in Cone Excitation Space in the Colour Cognition session chaired by Prof. Galina Paramei. This work was co-authored by the supervisors of my doctoral thesis Prof. Lewis D Griffin (Dept. Computer Science, UCL) and Prof. Andrew Stockman (Inst. Ophthalmology, UCL). Our results, we believe, could lead to important advances in our understanding of the interplay between colour perception and cognition in forming a central representation of the visual world.
On the whole, attending the symposium produced a memorable positive experience and I am delighted that I have been offered the opportunity to join the organising committee of the next ICVS symposium that will take place in Crete, Greece in 2021. As a final year PhD student, the limited travel and conference allowance attached to my EPSRC scholarship was exhausted and the financial support from AVA was decisive in my attendance of the symposium. I would like to thank the AVA for awarding me with the Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Award.
- Dimitris Mylonas