Good news for the University of Sassari, Italy, which will have the honour to host the European Conference on Visual Perception in 2012.

It will be an Italian city, Sassari, to host the 2012 European Conference on Visual Perception, which takes place every year in different cities dealing with themes like artificial vision systems, robotics, science of visual arts and everything related to human visual perception.

It is a very popular event, which was first held in 1978 in Marburg, Germany, and in 30 years time it has been hosted in many cities all over Europe. In 2010 the conference took place in Lausanne, while in 2011 it will be held in France, more precisely in Toulouse.

For the University of Sassari and the city of Alghero, which have been chosen to organize the event in 2012, this is an authentic honour. The ECVP is one of the main international events as far as the field of science vision is concerned, an event that is always joined by the most important scholars coming from different countries in the attempt of better understanding the human and animal vision system. The concerned disciplinary fields are various and different from each other, from experimental psychology to physics and psychophysics, from biology to neurosciences, from medicine to mathematics and engineering, and the research topics include many sectors, from artificial vision to neural networks, from computer vision to brain imaging, just to make some examples. The great success achieved by the conference through the years has resulted in the organization of other two important vents, which take place in the States (VSS – Vision Sciences) and Asia (ACV – Asian Conference on Vision).

Alghero was chosen as seat of the event in 2012 during the last conference, which was held in Lausanne, and together with the University of Sassari and the Department of Architecture, Design and City Planning it will host the event from the 2nd to the 6th of September in the Ospedale Santa Chiara, the future seat of the department that is being restored. The official announcement was given on the 9th of February, and the responsible team for the organization of the conference includes prof. Baingio Pinna, Giovanni Maciocco, Sebastiano Bagnara and dott. Arcangelo Uccula.

A source of pride for the city and the university, too, since the competition between cities to be charged with the organization of this main and prestigious event is always very high. In the days when this conference on everything concerning vision will take place, Alghero will attract more than a thousand scholars from all over the world, ready for a multidisciplinary work together with a team of researchers keen on art and science working in the city. In five days both the groups will introduce the results and the products they have realized, involving the whole city of Alghero and the University of Sassari.

The topic of the conference will be "IllusoriaMente" (the illusions of the mind) and will be dedicated to prof. Richard Gregory, an expert of vision science who passed away recently.