I am an Associate Professor (tenured) at the Electronics and Informatics department (ETRO) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Senior AI Scientist at imec, in Belgium, where I lead a research team of 12 researchers (4 postdoctoral researchers and 8 PhD students).

I am also the Programme Director of the Master in Applied Computer Science at VUB.

My research currently focuses on signal processing and machine learning theory and algorithms for explainable AI with applications in computer vision (image and video processing), data mining (air pollution data, social media data, recommender systems), and natural languange processing (fact verification).

I have authored 120+ journal and conference publications, book chapters, and two international patent applications in the areas of AI, machine learning, signal processing and information theory. My publications appear in top-tier journals (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory) and conferences (e.g., ICASSP, ICIP, NAACL and IPSN). Here are my Google Scholar and dblp profiles.

I am a member of the IEEE and EURASIP, and I serve as vice-chair of the EURASIP Technical Aread Committee on Signal and Data Analytics for Machine Learning.

I am the lead guest editor of the special issue on Understanding and Designing Deep Neural Networks at the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing.

Since 2013, I act as Expert Consultant in Machine Learning, AI and Big Data for various companies, public organisations and governments.

I have received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, and the PhD in Engineering Sciences (Highest Honors) from the VUB, Belgium, in 2012. From 2013 to 2015, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London, UK.

Scientific Awards

Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. The award was given in recognition of an innovative explainable deep recurrent neural network model for video data processing and analysis. [top 0.3% paper]

Young Scientist Best Paper Award at the NATO IST-160 Specialist’s Meeting Big Data and AI, Bordeaux, France, June 2018. The award was given in recognition of an innovative deep learning model that can detect fake news in social media and geolocate users.

2017 EURASIP Best PhD Award in recognition of the EURASIP doctoral thesis with the highest impact in terms of publications and citations in the period 2012-2017.

2013 Scientific Prize FWO-IBM Belgium for Informatics in recognition of the best doctoral thesis to have made an original contribution to informatics or its application.

Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras, ICDSC’11, Ghent, Belgium.

Vacancies

The following positions are available in my group:

PhD researcher in Explainable AI for Computer Vision (description)
Postdoctoral researcher in Multimodal Machine Learning (description)
Postdoctoral researcher in Natural Languange Processing (NLP) for Healthcare (description)

Interested PhD or postdoctoral research candidates please contact me.