Xian-Sheng Hua received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 1996 and 2001, respectively, both in applied mathematics. Since 2001, he has been with Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, where he is currently a Lead Researcher with the internet media group. His current interests are in the areas of video content analysis, multimedia search, management, authoring, sharing and advertising. He has authored more than 140 publications in these areas and has 40 filed patents or pending applications. Dr. HUA is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE. He is now an adjunct professor of University of Science and Technology of China, and serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and Editorial Board Member of Advances in Multimedia as well as Multimedia Tools and Applications. Dr. Hua won the Best Paper Award and Best Demonstration Award in ACM Multimedia 2007, Best Poster Award in 2008 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing. He also won 2008 MIT Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award, and named as one of the ¡°Business Elites of People under 40 to Watch¡± by Global Entrepreneur.
Tao Mei received the B.E. degree in automation and the Ph.D. degree in pattern recognition and intelligent systems from the University of Science and Technology of China, in 2001 and 2006, respectively. He joined Microsoft Research Asia as a Researcher Staff Member in 2006. His current research interests include multimedia content analysis, computer vision, and multimedia applications such as search, advertising, social network, and mobile applications. He is the author of seven book chapters and over 90 publications in these areas, and holds more than 25 filed international and U.S. patents or pending applications. He serves as an Associate Editor for Journal of Multimedia and Neurocomputing. He received the Best Paper and Best Demonstration Awards in ACM Multimedia 2007, the Best Poster Paper Award in IEEE MMSP 2008, and the Best Paper Award in ACM Multimedia 2009.
Alan Hanjalic is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Multimedia Information Retrieval lab at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Research interests and expertise of Dr. Hanjalic are in the area of multimedia signal processing, with focus on multimedia information retrieval. He (co-) authored and (co-)edited more than 100 publications, among which the books titled Image and Video Databases: Restoration, Watermarking and Retrieval (Elsevier, 2000) and Content-Based Analysis of Digital Video (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004) and several journal special issues, among which those in the Proceedings of the IEEE and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Dr. Hanjalic was a keynote speaker at the Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia 2007 and is an elected member of the IEEE TC on Multimedia Signal Processing. He has been on editorial boards of several journals in the field of multimedia, among which the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He has held key positions in the organizing committees in major multimedia conferences, such as ACM Multimedia (General Chair, Program Chair), IEEE ICME (Program Chair), ACM CIVR (Program Chair), ACM ICMR (Program Chair) and the WWW conference (Track Chair).