Gabriel Cristóbal received his Electrical Engineering degree from Univ. Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) in 1979. Thereafter, he obtained the PhD degree in Telecommunication Engineering at the same University in 1986. He has held several research positions at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid from 1982-89. G. Cristóbal is currently a Research Scientist at the Instituto de Optica (CSIC). His current research interests are joint representations,vision modelling, multidimensional signal processing and image quality assessment. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 1996. Peter Schelkens currently holds a professorship at the Department of Electronics and Informatics (ETRO) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). In addition he is member of the scientific staff of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (www.IBBT.be), Belgium and member of the board of councilors the Interuniversity Microelectronics Institute (www.IMEC.be), Belgium. Peter Schelkens coordinates a research team in the field of multimedia coding, communication and security and especially enjoys cross-disciplinary research. He has published over 200 papers in journals and conference proceedings, standardization contributions and holds several patents. He is also co-editor of the book, 'The JPEG 2000 Suite', published in 2009 by Wiley. His team is participating to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 (JPEG), WG11 (MPEG) and ITU-T standardization activities. Peter Schelkens is the Belgian head of delegation for the ISO/IEC JPEG standardization committee, editor/chair of part 10 of JPEG2000: 'Extensions for Three-Dimensional Data' and PR Chair of the JPEG committee. He is member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and is currently the Belgian EURASIP Liaison Officer. Hugo Thienpont is a full professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He chairs the Applied Physics and Photonics Department and is director of its photonics research group B-Phot. Hugo authored more than 200 SCI-stated journal papers and around 400 publications in international conference proceedings. His research work was internationally recognized with several awards. He also built up a track record as initiator, promoter or coordinator of many strategic research and networking projects at the European level.Besides academic-oriented research projects Hugo successfully manages several large-scale micro-photonics-related industrial projects with international companies. He is also appreciated by his peers for his service to the photonics community. One of his major achievements is the conception and initiation of SPIE's flagship symposium in Europe "Photonics Europe". He has served as associate editor of 'Optical Engineering' and 'Opto-Electronics Review' and was guest editor of several special issues on "Optics in Computing" and on "Optical Interconnects" for Applied Optics and the IEEE Journal of Sel. Top. on Quant. Electr. He currently serves on the board of directors of SPIE and is a member of the Board of Stakeholders of the Technology Platform Photonics21, a high-level advisory board for optics and photonics in Europe.
