Since 2011, I am an Associate Professor at the Media Integration and Communication Center (MICC) and at the Department of Information Engineering (DINFO) of the University of Florence (UNIFI), Florence, Italy, In April 2017, I got the habilitation as full Professor in Computer Engineering from the Italian Ministery of Education, University and Research (MIUR). 

My research interests are in the areas of Computer VIsion, Pattern Recognition and Multimedia. During my Ph.D. and post-doc, I worked on image databases for effective and efficient image retrieval based on color, shape attributes and spatial relationships. I also investigated the problem of retrieval from repositories distributed on the net using resource selection and results fusion. Then, I shifted my research interests more to 3D Computer Vision. In this scope, I provided several contributions on 3D object retrieval and partitioning, face biometrics (from 2D and 3D data), facial expression and emotion recognition (from 3D and 3D dynamic data), human action recognition from depth data, and 3D surface descriptors for relief patterns classification. Recently, I extended my interests to deep learning methods for face recognition, and to their generalization to non-Euclidean domains (i.e., graphs, meshes, manifolds, etc.).  

I have been actively involved, with different roles, in the organization of several conferences, among which the International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS) 1999, ACM Multimedia 2010 and European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2012. I was the Co-Chair of the Fifth Workshop on Non-Rigid Shape Analysis and Deformable Image Alignment (NORDIA) 2012, in conjunction with ECCV 2012, and I also served as Program Chair and Program Committee member of several conferences and workshops. I was the Program Co-Chair of the International Conference on SmartMultimedia (ICSM 2018), Toulone, France, August 24-26, 2018. I will be also Workshop and Tutorial Co-Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2019), LIlle, France, May 14-18, 2019.

I regularly serve as a Reviewer for many leading conferences and journals in the areas of Computer Vision, Pattern Rrcognition and Multimedia. Since 2016, I am the Information Director of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMM) and, from May 2018, Associate Editor of the IET Computer Vision journal (IETcv)

I am a member of the Italian Association for "Computer VIsion, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" (CVPL), previously known as "Group of Italian Researchers on Pattern Recognition" (GIRPR) affiliated to the International Association on Pattern Recognition (IAPR), of the Computer Vision Foundation (CVF), of the ACM, and senior member of the IEEE.

Studies

I received the Laurea degree (summa cum laude) in Electronics Engineering and the Ph.D. in Computers and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Florence, Italy, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. I also received the post-laurea degree in "Multimedia Content Design" from the Master in Multimedia of the same University in 2000. In 2001-2002, I was a post-doc researcher and then, from 2002 to 2011, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Systems and Informatics of the University of Florence.

In Spring 2000, I was visiting researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Mumbai, India. In Fall 2009, I was visiting researcher at the IMT Lille Douai Ecole Mines Télécome, IMT-Université de Lille, Lille, France. In Summer 2013, I was also visiting Professor at the Khalifa University (KU) Abu-Dhabi, Sharjah campus, United Arab Emirates.