Jiawei Han is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been working on research into data mining, data warehousing, stream data mining, spatiotemporal and multimedia data mining, biological data mining, social network analysis, text and Web mining, and software bug mining, with over 350 conference and journal publications. He has chaired or served in over 100 program committees of international conferences and workshops. He is currently the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), and on the Board of Directors for the Executive Committee of ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). Jiawei is an ACM Fellow and received ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (2004) and IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2005). His book "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques" has been adopted as a textbook worldwide.

Alberto Del Bimbo is a Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Università di Firenze, Italy. Since 1998 he is the Director of the Master in Multimedia of the Università di Firenze. At the present time, he is Deputy Rector of the Università di Firenze, in charge of Research and Innovation Transfer. His scientific interests are Pattern Recognition, Image Databases, Multimedia and Human Computer Interaction. Prof. Del Bimbo is the author of over 170 publications in the most distinguished international journals and conference proceedings. He is the author of the "Visual Information Retrieval" monography on content-based retrieval from image and video databases edited by Morgan Kaufman. He is Member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) and Fellow of IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition). He was/is an Associate Editor of Pattern Recognition, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal, Pattern Analysis and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He was the Guest Editor of several special issues on Image databases in highly respected journals.

Edward Chang received his M.S. in Computer Science and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He joined the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara, in September 1999. He received his tenure in March 2003, and was promoted to full professor of Electrical Engineering in 2006. His recent research activities are in the areas of machine learning, data mining, high-dimensional data indexing, and their applications to image databases, video surveillance, and Web mining. Recent research contributions of his group include methods for learning image/video query concepts via active learning with kernel methods, formulating distance functions via dynamic associations and kernel alignment, managing and fusing distributed video-sensor data, categorizing and indexing high-dimensional image/video information, and speeding up Support Vector Machines via parallel matrix factorization and indexing. Professor Chang has served on several ACM, IEEE, and SIAM conference program committees. He co-founded the annual ACM Video Sensor Network Workshop and has co-chaired it since 2003. In 2006, he co-chairs three international conferences: Multimedia Modeling (Beijing), SPIE/IS&T Multimedia Information Retrieval (San Jose), and ACM Multimedia (Santa Barbara). He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Multimedia Systems Journal. Professor Chang is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Partnership Award and the NSF Career Award. He is currently on leave from UC, heading R&D effort at Google/China.