Marco Gori, Marcello Pelillo, Fabio Roli

Speaker biography: Marco Gori received the Ph.D. degree in 1990 from Università di Bologna, Italy, working partly at the School of Computer Science (McGill University, Montreal). In 1992, he became an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Università di Firenze and, in November 1995, he joint the Università di Siena, where he is currently full professor of computer science. His main interests are in machine learning with applications to pattern recognition, Web mining, and game playing. He is especially interested in bridging logic and learning and in the connections between symbolic and sub-symbolic representation of information. He was the leader of the WebCrow project for automatic solving of crosswords, that outperformed human competitors in an official competition which took place during the ECAI-06 conference. As a follow up of this grand challenge he founded QuestIt, a spin-off company of the University of Siena, working in the field of question-answering. He is co-author of the book “Web Dragons: Inside the myths of search engines technologies,” Morgan Kauffman (Elsevier), 2006. Dr. Gori serves (has served) as an Associate Editor of a number of technical journals related to his areas of expertise, he has been the recipient of best paper awards, and keynote speakers in a number of international conferences. He was the Chairman of the Italian Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is a fellow of the IEEE, ECCAI, IAPR. He is in the list of top Italian scientists kept by the VIA-Academy (http://www.topitalianscientists.org/top_italian_scientists.aspx)

Speaker biography: Marcello Pelillo is Full Professor of Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he directs the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT) and the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition group, which he established in 1995. He held visiting research positions at Yale University, McGill University, the University of Vienna, York University (UK), the University College London, and the National ICT Australia (NICTA). He has published more than 200 technical papers in refereed journals, handbooks, and conference proceedings in the areas of machine learning, pattern recognition and computer vision. He serves as a General Chair for ICCV 2017 and has initiated several conference series, including EMMCVPR in 1997, IWCV in 2008, SIMBAD in 2011. He serves (has served) on the Editorial Boards of several journals including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), IET Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Brain Informatics, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics. He has served (serves) as Guest Editor for various special issues of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. His interest in the philosophical aspects of machine learning and pattern recognition has recently led him to run several initiatives devoted to this topic, among which a workshop at NIPS in 2011, a tutorial at ICPR 2014, and a special issue of Pattern Recognition Letters (2015). He is (or has been) scientific coordinator of several research project such as SIMBAD, an EU-FP7 project devoted to similarity-based pattern analysis and recognition whose activity is described in a recently published Springer book, and he has recently won an award from the Samsung Global Research Outreach (GRO) program. Prof. Pelillo is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IAPR. He has recently been appointed IEEE SMC Distinguished Lecturer.

Speaker biography: Fabio Roli is a Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and Director of the Pattern Recognition and Applications laboratory (https://pralab.diee.unica.it/) that he founded from scratch in 1995 and it is now a world-class research lab with 30 staff members, including five tenured Faculty members. He has been doing research on the design of pattern recognition systems for twenty-five years. Prof. Roli has published 71 journal articles and 180 conference articles on pattern recognition and machine learning and many of his papers are frequently cited. His current h-index is 47 according to Google Scholar, and his papers collected 8126 citations. He has been appointed Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He was the President of the Italian Group of Researchers in Pattern Recognition and the Chairman of the IAPR Technical Committee on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition. He was a member of NATO advisory panel for Information and Communications Security, NATO Science for Peace and Security (2008 – 2011). Prof. Roli is one of the pioneers of the use of pattern recognition and machine learning for computer security. His seminal work on filtering of image-based spam, published in 2006 in J. of Machine Learning Research, has been cited 149 times (ref. Google Scholar) and won the award for the best research project at the Security Summit 2009. He is often invited to give keynote speeches and tutorials on adversarial machine learning and data-driven technologies for security applications (recently at ICPRAM 2016, CYBCONF 2015, CIARP 2013). He is (or has been) the PI of dozens of R&D projects (https://pralab.diee.unica.it/en/Projects), including the leading European projects on security&privacy CyberRoad (Development of the Cybercrime and Cyber-terrorism Research Roadmap – https://www.cyberroad-project.eu) and ILLBuster (Buster of ILLegal contents spread by malicious computer networks – http://illbuster-project.eu).