Prof. Ioannis Pitas (IEEE fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) received the Diploma and PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece. Since 1994, he has been a Professor at the Department of Informatics of AUTH and Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) lab. He served as a Visiting Professor at several Universities.
His current interests are in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, autonomous systems, intelligent digital media, image/video processing, human-centred computing, affective computing, 3D imaging and biomedical imaging. He has published over 920 papers, contributed to 45 books in his areas of interest and edited or (co-)authored another 11 books. He has also been member of the program committee of many scientific conferences and workshops. In the past he served as Associate Editor or co-Editor of 13 international journals and General or Technical Chair of 5 international conferences. He delivered 98 keynote/invited speeches worldwide. He co-organized 33 conferences and participated in technical committees of 291 conferences. He participated in 71 R&D projects, primarily funded by the European Union and is/was principal investigator in 43 such projects. He is AUTH principal investigator in H2020 R&D projects Aerial Core, AI4Media (one of the 4 H2020 ICT48 AI flagship projects) and Horizon Europe R&D projects AI4Europe, SIMAR.
He is chair of the International AI Doctoral Academy (AIDA) https://www.i-aida.org/. He was chair and initiator of the IEEE Autonomous Systems Initiative https://ieeeasi.signalprocessingsociety.org/. Prof. Pitas lead the big European H2020 R&D project MULTIDRONE: https://multidrone.eu/ He has 34500+ citations to his work and h-index 87+. According to https://research.com/ he is ranked first in Greece and 319 worldwide in the field of Computer Science (2022).