Piero has a background in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence. He dropped out of a Ph.D. in bio inspired robotics to work on commercial applications of the topic he studied. In the last years he specialized in web development, trying to contribute with machine learning, 3D simulations, data analysis and visualization.

Alexander Loos is a research engineer at the Audio-visual Systems group of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), Ilmenau, Germany. He studied computational engineering at the Ilmenau University of Technology and completed his studies with a diploma thesis entitled “Erweiterung von Verfahren zur Transkription von Solo-Parts in Musikstücken”.

In 2009 he joined the institute as a PhD student in the Audio-visual systems group. He is author of a number of scientific publications and worked in several industry projects and public funded research projects in the field of audio-visual fingerprinting, content-based image retrieval and face recognition. He is involved in the German research project SAISBECO and lead of the workpackage identification of Great Apes using face recognition.

His main research interests comprise image and video analysis, pattern recognition, face recognition, multimodal signal processing, and machine learning.

Kai Schlegel is a researcher at the University of Passau working on Semantic Web, Software Engineering and modern Web Technologies. Kai Schlegel received his master degree at the University of Passau, Germany in 2012. As master thesis he implemented different optimization strategies of query stream processing in a federated multimedia retrieval context. From February 2011 until April 2012, he was involved in the THESEUS Medico project as a student researcher focusing an external meta-search engine in the medical field. Since May 2012, he is enlisted in the work package for Data Querying, Aggregation and Provenance in the FP7 CODE project. In his PhD thesis, he is working on the following topics: semantic web technologies, data provenance and data discovery. Besides he is interested in modern web technologies and software engineering.

Quick Facts:
Location: Passau, Germany
Hobbies: traveling, snowboarding, squash, software engineering
Passionate about: tech gadgets

Adam Dahlgren is a student in Computer Science at Umeå University who will be participate in MICO as a research assistant. Adam is a talented programmer and on the organizing committee of Frostbyte, one of the Nordic countries’ largest LAN parties.

Astronomer and founder of both Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse that grew from it, Chris is interested in how galaxies form and evolve, how citizen science can change the world, and whether the Chicago Fire can get their act together. 

Zooniverse community manager. A former exoplanetary scientist, Grant is now responsible for looking after the interests of Zooniverse volunteers. He is also behind the Zooniverse’s presence on social media and publishes the Daily Zooniverse blog. Grant obtained a PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2012. His thesis work was on the detection and characterisation of transiting exoplanets. He then spent a short time as observatory manager and teaching assistant in St Andrews before starting work with the Zooniverse, at the University of Oxford, in 2013.

Quick Facts: Location: Oxford, United Kingdom Hobbies: Playing various ball sports, guitar, quizzing Passionate about: Science communication, travelling, music, sport, film & TV

Chalitha holds a Honours Degree of Bachelor of the Science of Engineering from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa. During his academic years, he and his team won the gold medal for best student research project, undergraduate category at CGO’15 (Code generation and Optimization) ACM student research competition. He currently works as a software engineer for Zaizi and involved in research and development activities. He is passionate about mathematics and machine intelligence.

Hobbies: Reading, Movies and Music

Frank Drewes is the director of the research group Natural and Formal Languages at Umeå University and a specialist in formal models for the description and manipulation of complex structures. Frank received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bremen in Germany in 1996. In 2000 he joined Umeå University as a lecturer and became professor in 2010. His main interest and expertise is in Theoretical Computer Science, more specifically, formal grammars and automata that enable us to model complex systems and their dynamic behaviour while having a precise semantics and good algorithmic properties. In particular, he is a specialist in grammars and automata on pictures, trees, and graphs, areas to which he has contributed with many scientific articles and conference contributions. In particular, he is the author of a monograph on Grammatical Picture Generation in the Springer series Texts in Theoretical Computer Science and of the software system TREEBAG that makes it possible to experiment with the tree-based generation of objects of different descriptions.

Quick Facts:

Location: Umeå University, Department of Computing Science (http://www.cs.umu.se, http://www.cs.umu.se/personal/frank-drewes, http://goo.gl/maps/J1jBg)

Hobbies: Dart frogs, photography (http://www.frank-drewes.se [only Swedish and German])

Passionate about: My daughter, an elegant proof of a new theorem, my hobbies

• http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Drewes

Dr.-Ing. Uwe Kuehhirt studied Electrical Engineering at Technical University Ilmenau (Germany). He has been working at the Institute of Media Technology at the same University as a researcher in the field of interactive audiovisual applications using the MPEG-4 standard. He has been giving lectures on Interactive Media and Multimedia Tools at TU Ilmenau and he is author of the specialist book “Interactive Audiovisual Media”. His Ph.D. thesis is titled “Authoring of object-based A/V applications”. In 2005 he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau. Today he is leading the Metadata department and the Audio-visual Systems group. His working fields are automatic analysis of A/V data especially for broadcast applications, and interactive A/V applications. He has been involved in several industrial and publicly funded projects, including EU projects DIOMEDES and CUbRIK.

Sascha Krämer is a software engineer at the Audio-visual Systems group of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), Ilmenau, Germany. He joined the insitute in 2006 starting as trainee to an IT specialist for application development. Afterwards he studied Applied Computer Science at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW) in Stuttgart. In collaboration with Daimler AG he wrote his student research thesis about evaluation of GPU algorithms for image processing and furthered this knowledge in his bachelor thesis at Fraunhofer IDMT.

As a core developer he is involved e.g. in the development of interfaces for demonstration applications, implementation of classes and creating graphical user interfaces as well as optimization of internal program sequences.