Pietro Pala received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Information and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Florence, Florence, Italy, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with the University of Florence, where he teaches Image and Video Analysis and Database Management Systems at the School of Information Engineering. His research activity has focused on the use of pattern recognition models for multimedia information retrieval and biometrics. Currently, the research activity focuses on 3D action recognition and on the study of biometric models for person recognition based on 3D facial scans.

Pietro Pala

Stefano Berretti is Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Firenze. He has been also visiting professor at Institute TELECOM Lille 1, Lille, France, and at Khalifa University, Sharjah, UAE. His research interests have been mainly focussed on content modeling, retrieval, and indexing in image databases. Recent works have addressed 3D object retrieval and partitioning, 3D face recognition, 3D/4D facial expression recognition and action recognition.

Stefano Berretti

I’m working as assistant professor at the Dipartimento Sistemi e Informatica of the University of Florence, and I teach at the Master in Multimedia and at the School of Engineering. My research work is in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition, and i mostly work on automatic video analysis, annotation and semantic transcoding. You can find more about my research browsing the list of my papers. I received the Laurea Degree in electronics engineering (Laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica) from the University of Florence in 1999, and Ph.D. in 2004.

Marco Bertini

I’m working in the Visual Information Processing lab of the University of Florence. From 1999 to 2002 I’ve worked in the EU IST ASSAVID Project, that dealt with the automatic annotation of sports videos. The other project partners where the University of Surrey, Sony BPU UK, BBC, ACS and IDIAP. From 2004 to 2007 I’ve worked within the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, funded by the EU Sixth Framework Programme. At present I’m working on a new EU research project: VIDI-Video. The goal is to allow semantic access to video content by means of detection of a large number of concepts. The prototypes that will be developed within the project will particpate to NIST TRECVID. My teaching experience includes Unix Fundamentals, Video Editing, CISCO CCNA and XML in the Master in Multimedia of the University of Florence – years 2000 through 2007. I’m currently teaching assistant for Progettazione e Produzione Multimediale (in particular MPEG 1, 2 and 4, XML) and Database Multimediali (in particular MPEG 7) at the School of Engineering.

Alberto Del Bimbo is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Università di Firenze, Italy. Since 1998 he is the Director of the Master in Multimedia of the Università di Firenze. His scientific interests are pattern recognition, image databases, multimedia and human computer interaction. Prof. Del Bimbo is the author of over 250 publications in the most distinguished international journals and conference proceedings.

Alberto Del Bimbo