Prof. Rama Chellappa received the B.E. (Hons.) degree from the University of Madras, India, in 1975 and the M.E. (Distinction) degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1977. He received M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1978 and 1981 respectively. Since 1991, he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and an affiliate Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. He is also affiliated with the Center for Automation Research (Director) and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (Permanent Member). In 2005, he was named a Minta Martin Professor of Engineering. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he was an Assistant (1981-1986) and Associate Professor (1986-1991) and Director of the Signal and Image Processing Institute (1988-1990) at University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Over the last 29 years, he has published numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He has co-authored and edited books on MRFs, face and gait recognition and collected works on image processing and analysis. His current research interests are face and gait analysis, markerless motion capture, 3D modeling from video, image and video-based recognition and exploitation and hyper spectral processing.
Sergios Theodoridis is professor emeritus of machine learning and data processing with the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece. He has also served as distinguished professor with the Aalborg University Denmark and as professor with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China. In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate degree (D.Sc) from the University of Edinburgh, U.K. He has also received a number of prestigious awards, including the 2014 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, the 2009 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award, the 2017 European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) Athanasios Papoulis Award, the 2014 IEEE Signal Processing Society Carl Friedrich Gauss Education Award, and the 2014 EURASIP Meritorious Service Award. He has served as president of EURASIP and vice president for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He is a Fellow of EURASIP and a Life Fellow of IEEE. He is the coauthor of the book Pattern Recognition, 4th edition, Academic Press, 2009 and of the book Introduction to Pattern Recognition: A MATLAB Approach, Academic Press, 2010.