Keynote Lectures

Simulation: What Made us Intelligent Will Make our Robots Intelligent

 

Brief Bio
Antonio Loquercio (https://antonilo.github.io/) is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD and M.Sc. from UZH and  ETH Zurich in 2021 and 2017. His research interests include learning-based robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. His work includes seminal results on vision-based agile flight via learning sensorimotor policies and continual learning in legged locomotion. He is the recipient of the 2017 ETH Medal for Outstanding Master Thesis, the Best System Paper Award at the Conference on Robot Learning (CORL) 2018, the RSS’20 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, and the T-RO’20 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention. His article on superhuman drone racing was featured on Nature’s cover. He received the Georges Giralt PhD Award, the most prestigious award for PhD dissertations in robotics in Europe.

I Know What You Are Thinking: A Journey from Symbols to Minds

 

Brief Bio
Foteini Simistira Liwicki received her Ph.D. diploma from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NTUA, Greece, in the field of Pattern Recognition in 2015 with the title “Recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions”. From 1997 till 2015, she worked as Research Associate in the Institute of Language and Speech Processing, ATHENA R.C., where she was mainly responsible for research programs in the field of Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She was also highly involved in the design and development of innovative educational platforms (targeting mainly high school education in Greece but also in other European countries). From 2015 till June 2019 she worked as a PostDoc fellow in the University of Fribourg, in the field of Document Image Analysis and Database generation. From June 2018 till June 2019 she worked as a PostDoc fellow with the Machine Learning group at the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. From May 2022, she is working as Associate Professor at the Luleå University, in the area of Machine Learning with focus on combining Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience.

30 Years of Face Recognition Research: a Vision Ahead

 

Brief Bio
Massimo Tistarelli received the Phd in Computer Science and Robotics in 1991 from the University of Genoa. He is Full Professor in Computer Science (with tenure) and director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Sassari, Italy. Since 1986 he has been involved as project coordinator and task manager in several projects on computer vision and biometrics funded by the European Community.
Since 1994 he has been the director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Department of Communication, Computer and Systems Science of the University of Genoa, and now at the University of Sassari, leading several National and European projects on computer vision applications and image-based biometrics.
Prof. Tistarelli is a founding member of the Biosecure Foundation, which includes all major European research centers working in biometrics. His main research interests cover biological and artificial vision (particularly in the area of recognition, three-dimensional reconstruction and dynamic scene analysis), pattern recognition, biometrics, visual sensors, robotic navigation and visuo-motor coordination. He is one of the world-recognized leading researchers in the area of biometrics, especially in the field of face recognition and multimodal fusion. He is coauthor of about 200 scientific papers in peer reviewed books, conferences and international journals. He is the principal editor for the Springer books “Handbook of Remote Biometrics” and “Handbook of Biometrics for Forensic Science”.
Prof. Tistarelli organized and chaired several world-recognized several scientific events and conferences in the area of Computer Vision and Biometrics. He has been associate editor for several scientific journals including IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior and Identity Science, IEEE Transactions on PAMI, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Tecnologies, IET Biometrics and Pattern Recognition Letters.
Since 2003 he is the founding director for the Int.l Summer School on Biometrics (now at the 22nd edition – https://biometrics.uniss.it). He served as vice president of the IEEE Biometrics Council, first vice president of the IAPR and chair of the IAPR Fellow committee. He is a Fellow member of the IAPR and Senior member of the IEEE. In 2022 he was awarded the IEEE Biometrics Council Meritorious Service Award.

Seeing the Heartbeat: Remote Physiological Signal Measurement and Applications Using Facial Videos

 

Brief Bio
Guoying Zhao received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2005. She is currently an Academy Professor and full Professor (tenured in 2017) with University of Oulu. She is also a visiting professor with Aalto University. She is a member of Academia Europaea, a member of Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, ELLIS and AAIA. She has authored or co-authored more than 360 papers in journals and conferences with 35060+ citations in Google Scholar and h-index 90. She is the recipient of 2024 IAPR Maria Petrou Prize. She has been associate Editor-in-Chief for Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU), was/is associate editor for IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, Pattern Recognition, IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Image and Vision Computing and Frontiers in Psychology Journals. She is general co-chair for CVIP2025 and ACII 2025, was program co-chair for ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021), tutorial chair for ICPR 2024, panel chair for FG 2023, publicity chair of 22nd Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis (SCIA 2023) and FG2018, and has served as area chairs for many conferences. Her current research interests include image and video representation, facial-expression and micro-expression recognition, emotional gesture analysis, affective computing, and biometrics. Her research has been reported by Finnish TV programs, newspapers and MIT Technology Review.