EXTREMA COST action: live from Leiden

This week I am taking part to the workshop at Lorentz Center (Leiden, The Netherlands) "Artefacts in X-ray tomography". The workshop is part of the COST action, a European framework that allocates funds for multidisciplinary innovative projects, stimulating an active and fruitful collaboration among European researchers and professionals.

This is my third workshop of the EXTREMA action. These meetings gather people working in X-ray tomography with different approaches and background, and facilitate networking and collaborations. In my short experience of conferences and workshop, they are the most effective and, in fact, the community is expanding.

Not only the organisers bring together professionals from different backgrounds (including people from industry), but the format of the meetings is planned to stimulate interaction. Yesterday we had a discussion in the speed dating form. Just in half an hour I made three interesting connections for future collaboration! You can breathe enthusiasm all around at the EXTREMA events.

Here at Leiden the ASTRA toolbox was launched after the January release. It's a free and opensource MatLab toolbox for tomographic data reconstruction, developed by Vision Lab (*) at University of Antwerp, Belgium. It comes with several reconstruction algorithms (so not only FBP!) and facilitates the creation of new one. In a community where is hard to share progress and results because of different backgrounds, this offers an incredible tool to advance.

Another free toolbox was presented by Argonne laboratory here: TomoPy. It's a collaborative framework to facilitate scientists working in the different synchrotron facilities around the world and stimulating data and solutions exchange.

Before concluding this brief update, I take the chance to thank the organisers of the current event, it's been a pleasant and productive week. If you got curious about this series of meetings, the next is in April in Italy (Meeting on Discrete Tomography).

(*) If you are interested in ASTRA, VisionLab organises training events.

Edit: thanks to Samuli Siltanen who sent me some nice pictures of the past days:

Paola Elefante

Digital Scaling Project Manager at Plan International. Proud mother & wife. Shameless nerd&geek. Feminist. Undercover gourmet.

One thought to “EXTREMA COST action: live from Leiden”

  1. Dear Paola

    Thanks so much for this wonderful report! It summarizes the workshop perfectly! Let's make the 4D CT reconstruction of bubbles in a glass of champagne (using level sets and a golden ration scanning? 🙂 ) one of our next challenges!

    Kind regards

    Jan

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