I came across your article “That joke isn’t funny anymore” in the April issue of Vision System Design. It is a nice and well-written comment, full of expert knowledge, experience, and even humor. It is easy to identify you as someone who knows what he writes and vice versa. Therefore, I enjoyed your article very much. Although, I probably cannot compete with your entertaining style of writing, I discussed your topic with my students to explain real-world problems in the field of machine-vision integrators.

These students are educated in a four-year-course called “Optical Technologies and Image Processing” at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany. We hope to belong to the “few universities and colleges that bundle these subjects into a single degree,” as you phrased it. It seems that you know more about institutions that offer a similar education. I would be more than happy if you could share this information with me, because we are looking for partners in Germany, Europe, or worldwide to exchange students, and, as you wrote, it is not easy to find some.

Ralf Blendowske
University of Applied Sciences , Optical Technologies and Image Processing
Darmstadt, Germany, blendowske@h-da.de

Tue Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2008