Rafael, founder and Technology Director of Vida Software, has been involved in, and has led, several software product development lifecycles for companies such as Reuters and TIBCO Software. The products he has been involved with were marketed successfully, and are still in production for companies such as Reuters and CNN. Rafael holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Granada, where he specialised in Mathematical Fundamentals and Artificial Intelligence.
Prof. Michael Gerassimos Strintzis is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, and, since 1999, Director of the Informatics and Telematics Research Institute, Thessaloniki. His current research interests include 2-D and 3-D image coding, image processing, biomedical signal and image processing, content-based indexing and retrieval and DVD and Internet data authentication and copy protection. Dr. Strintzis is serving as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology since 1999. In 1984, he was awarded one of the Centennial Medals of the IEEE.
Dr. Dimitrios Tzovaras is a Senior Researcher Grade C (Assistant Professor) at the Informatics and Telematics Institute. He received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. in 2D and 3D Image Compression from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1992 and 1997, respectively. His main research interests include virtual reality, haptics, computer graphics, 3D data processing, multimedia image communication, image compression and 3D content-based search. His involvement with those research areas has led to the co-authoring of over thirty articles in refereed journals and more than eighty papers in international conferences. Since 1992, Dr Tzovaras has been involved in more than 20 projects, funded by the EC and the Greek Ministry of Research and Technology.
George Nikolakis received the Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997. Currently he is a postgraduate student in the Laboratory of Medical Informatics at the Medical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Since October 2000, he is associated with the Informatics and Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki, holding a position of technical responsible in the Augmented and Virtual Reality Laboratory. His involvement with those research areas has led to the co-authoring of 2 book chapters and 1 journal and 9 papers in international conferences. His research interests include haptics, computer human interaction, rehabilitation and assistive technology.
Konstantinos Moustakas is a PhD candidate at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 2003. He is a Phd student at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His main research interests include image and video processing, virtual reality, computer graphics and computer vision. Currently he is working on deformable object modelling, simulation and 3D data processing.
Kai Richter is a scientific staff member of the Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV) in Darmstadt, Germany. Michael Hellenschmidt a is scientific staff member of Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD). Their research focusses issues of accessibility to and interaction through multi-modal and multi-device user interfaces as fundamental aspects of Ambient Intelligence. Both institutes form part of the INI-GraphicsNet, an international network of R&D institutes of computer graphics headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. José L.Encarnação.
IntuiLab is a two-year old company created by French researchers to transform their research results into more natural user interfaces for everyone. It is specialized in both innovation and industrial solutions. Composed of interface designers, usability engineers, software engineers and researchers, IntuiLab organises its activity between interface design and prototyping for industrial customers, research on interaction styles and software engineering, and the development of a model-driven interface design suite named IntuiKit. Customers are from the aerospace, automotive and telecoms industries. IntuiLab's designs range from highly visual, highly interactive graphical interfaces to multimodal interfaces combining graphics, gestures and speech.
Matthias Denecke obtained his masters degree in Computer Science from Karlsruhe University in 1995 and his masters degree in Computational Linguistics from Stuttgart University in 1997. After spending several years building spoken dialogue systems at Carnegie Mellon University and a university spin-off company, he obtained his Ph.D. degree from Karlsruhe University in 2002. Since 2003, he is research associate at NTT in Atsugi, Japan, researching learning algorithms and automated design of spoken dialogue systems.
Maria Farrugia received a B.Eng (Hons) degree in Electronics Engineering (1997) and a Ph.D in Multimedia Communications Engineering (2001), both from the University of Surrey, UK. After working for NEC, developing Radio Resource Management algorithms for 3G WCDMA networks, she joined Vodafone R&D-UK in 2002, where she is currently investigating multimedia content delivery mechanisms and novel (e.g. multimodal) human-terminal interaction techniques.
The group Human Interface Technology (HIT) ensures for group THALES the control, the development, the adaptation and the integration of the software techniques aiming at improving quality and the effectiveness of the relation Men-Machine. That implies in particular the introduction of new paradigms of interaction and communication such as distributed virtual environments and interaction, voice recognition and multi modal interaction.
Fabio Paternò is senior researcher at ISTI-CNR, where he leads the Human Interfaces in Information Systems Research Laboratory. He has been the coordinator of a number of European and other types of projects on user interface software-related topics. His main interests are in methods and tools for design and evaluation of usable interactive software systems accessible through many types of contexts and modalities.
Filip Van Gool is senior researcher at R&D competence centre of Intesi Group, where he leads projects around security in emergent technologies. He is currently working on Aurora, an ITEA project on Multi Modality. Within the Aurora project, he is currently investigating multimodal paradigms and security issues raised by the latter. His main interests are the conception of new interaction mode paradigms. Intesi Group's main focus consists in providing innovative solutions in wide range of domains. The company endorses the promotion of projects that can assist in the adoption and acceptance of new and more efficient practices, bringing a wider market and new business opportunities to all players.
Kallirroi Georgila is a Research Fellow at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, working on the TALK project. She was born in Greece, and graduated in 1993 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Patras. From 1993 to 2003 she worked as a software engineer for Knowledge S.A., in Patras, Greece. In 1996 she joined, as a PhD student and researcher, the Speech and Language Technology Group of the Wire Communications Laboratory in the above department. Her PhD thesis on "Language modelling for spoken dialogue systems" was completed in November 2002. Her research interests include language modelling, speech recognition, dialogue modelling, spoken dialogue systems, and hidden Markov models.
Oliver Lemon is a Research Fellow at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He was formerly a Senior Project Engineer at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford University, California, working on multimodal dialogue systems (2000-2002). He holds a PhD from the Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh University, for work in dialogue modelling, logic, and formal semantics (1996), and BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy from Manchester University (1992). He was Research Associate in the AI group at Manchester University (1995-98), working on spatial logics and graphical reasoning, and was a visiting scientist at NASA (Ames Research Center) in 2002. He was a lecturer in AI and computational linguistics at Trinity College, Dublin (1998-99). He is currently Scientific Coordinator of the FP6 project "TALK", focusing on machine learning techniques in multimodal dialogue systems.
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