Invited Speakers

Alberto del Bimbo is Full Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of University of Firenze, where he serves as Director of MICC–Media Integration and Communication Center. He was President of the Foundation for Research and Innovation, Deputy-Rector for Research and Innovation and Director of the Department of Systems and Computer Science. Prof. Del Bimbo leads a research team at the Media Integration and Communication Center investigating cutting-edge solutions in the fields of computer vision, multimedia content analysis, indexing and retrieval, and advanced multimedia and multimodal interactivity. He is the author of over 350 publications that were published in some of the most prestigious journals and conferences. He has been the coordinator of many research and industrial projects at the international and national level.

He provided services to the scientific community having been, among the others, the Program Chair of the Int’l Conferences on Pattern Recognition ICPR 2016, and ICPR 2012, and ACM Multimedia 2008, and the General Chair of the European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2012, the ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia Retrieval ICMR 2011, ACM Multimedia 2010, and IEEE ICMCS 1999, the Int’l Conference on Multimedia Computing & Systems.

Presently, he is the Editor in Chief of ACM TOMM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications and Associate Editor of Multimedia Tools and Applications, Pattern Analysis and Applications journals. He was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and also served as the Guest Editor of many Special Issues in highly ranked journals.

Prof. Del Bimbo is IAPR Fellow and the recipient of the 2016 ACM SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications

Arnold Smeulders received an M.Sc from the Technical University of Delft in physics in 1977, and in 1983, a PhD from the medical faculty of Leiden University on the topic of visual pattern analysis. Subsequently, I was associated professor in medical image analysis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 1989, I moved to the University of Amsterdam to become associate professor of computer science and full professor in biological image processing. Since 1994, I am full professor in multimedia information analysis at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam.

Currently, he leads the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam. ISLA is composed of three groups. The IAS group researches intelligent autonomous systems and the ILPS group investigates information and language processing. The Intelligent Sensory Information Systems group, ISIS, conducts research in the theory, practice, and implementation of multimedia information analysis. In this group, his scientific interest is in computer vision, content-based image and video retrieval, tracking, learning, and pictures and language. ISIS has an extensive record in co-operations with Dutch industry and long-term relations with the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid and the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut. Since 2001, he is director of MultimediaN, a nation-wide, large program for multimedia information processing supported by the Dutch government. He is currently also director of ASCI, a nation-wide research school on computing and imaging. he is an associate editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and of the IEEE transactions on multimedia. Since 2000, he is elected fellow of International Association of Pattern Recognition, and he is a honorary member of the Dutch Society for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing.

As concerns the past, in 1987, he received a Fulbright grant for a visiting associate professorship at Yale University. He was visiting professor at the City University Hong Kong and ETL Tsukuba Japan. He was associated editor of the IEEE transactions PAMI as well as Cytometry. He served as the treasurer of the Faculty in 1996-1997, director of the institute 1997-2001, and as a director of educational programs 2001-2004. In 2005, he was chairman of the organizing committee of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2005 in Amsterdam.