2014 JMLR Gesture

Sergio Escalera

Computer Vision Center (UAB) and University of Barcelona, Spain

sergio.escalera.guerrero@gmail.com

Sergio Escalera is Full Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Universitat de Barcelona, where he is the head of the Informatics degree. He is ICREA Academia. He leads the Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis Group. He is Distinguished Professor at Aalborg University. He is vice-president of ChaLearn Challenges in Machine Learning, leading ChaLearn Looking at People events. He is also Fellow of the ELLIS European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems working within the Human-centric Machine Learning program. He participated in several international funded projects and received an Amazon Research Award. He has published more than 300 research papers and received a CVPR best paper award nominee and a CVPR outstanding reviewer award.

Vassilis Athitsos

University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, United States of America

athitsos@uta.edu

Vassilis Athitsos received the BS degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1995, the MS degree in computer science from the University of Chicago in 1997, and the PhD degree in computer science from Boston University in 2006. In 2005-2006 he worked as a researcher at Siemens Corporate Research, developing methods for database-guided medical image analysis. In 2006-2007 he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Computer Science department at Boston University. In August 2007 he joined the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he currently serves as associate professor. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, and data mining. His recent work has focused on gesture and sign language recognition, detection and tracking of humans using computer vision, efficient similarity-based retrieval in multimedia databases, shape modeling and detection, and medical image analysis. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award.

Isabelle Guyon

University Paris-Saclay, France and ChaLearn USA

isabelle@clopinet.com

Isabelle Guyon ( http://guyon.chalearn.org/ ) is chaired professor in “big data” at the Université ParisSaclay, specialized in statistical data analysis, pattern recognition and machine learning. She is one of the cofounders of the ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) challenge series and she pioneered applications of the MIcrosoft Kinect to gesture recognition. Her areas of expertise include computer vision and and bioinformatics. Prior to joining ParisSaclay she worked as an independent consultant and was a researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she pioneered applications of neural networks to pen computer interfaces (with collaborators including Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio) and coinvented with Bernhard Boser and Vladimir Vapnik Support Vector Machines (SVM), which became a textbook machine learning method. She worked on early applications of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to handwriting recognition in the 1990’s. She is also the primary inventor of SVMRFE, a variable selection technique based on SVM. The SVMRFE paper has thousands of citations and is often used as a reference method against which new feature selection methods are benchmarked. She also authored a seminal paper on feature selection that received thousands of citations. She organized many challenges in Machine Learning since 2003 supported by the EU network Pascal2, NSF, and DARPA, with prizes sponsored by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Disney Research, and Texas Instrument. Isabelle Guyon holds a Ph.D. degree in Physical Sciences of the University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France. She is president of Chalearn, a nonprofit dedicated to organizing challenges, vicepresident of the Unipen foundation, adjunct professor at NewYork University, action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, editor of the Challenges in Machine Learning book series of Microtome, and program chair of the upcoming NIPS 2016 conference.