International Advisory Board

The International Advisory Board (IAB) consists of five distinguished researchers and was established in 2023 by the director of UTIA as an advisory body. Its primary mission is to help the management of the Institute to decide on the major ways of research and educational activities, and to consult the internal evaluation system. The IAB also supports the Institute's international visibility.

Prof. Guanrong Chen, PhD, IEEE Life Fellow. Professor Chen holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Texas A&M University, USA in 1987. He is a Chair Professor and Founding Director of "Centre for Complexity and Complex Networks, City University of Hong Kong" since 2000, before that he was a Professor at the University of Houston, Texas, USA. Prof. Chen holds the prestigious titles of IEEE Fellow since 1997 became an IEEE Life Fellow in 2019. He was named "Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering" and " Highly Cited Researcher in Mathematics" by Thomson Reuters. Prof. Chen is the recipient of the Euler Gold Medal in 2011, the Chinese State Prize for Natural Sciences in 2008, 2012 and 2016, and eight best paper awards from major journals and organizations. He is an honorary doctor or professor of various degrees in about 30 universities around the world. Prof. Chen has extensive experience in managing a number of scientific projects, including large-scale ones, and is also an industrial consultant, so he will certainly support the management of the project organizationally , including orientation to the applicability of the results.
Prof. Dr. Alessandro E. P. Villa, PhD, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, School of Business and Economics. Prof. Villa is a recognized expert in the field of neuro-economics and dynamic decision making. His work bridges many disciplines: from neurobiology, to theories investigating brain activity, biomedical engineering and data analysis. His exploration of the evolving neural mechanisms of dynamic decision making relies on a combination of clinical applications, experiments and modelling.
Prof. Josef Kittler, ScD., PhD.h.c.mult., University of Surrey, UK, is one of the world's most prominent and cited scientists in the field of image recognition and processing. He has worked on various theoretical aspects of pattern recognition, image analysis, and computer vision, and on many applications including system identification, automated scanning, ECG diagnosis, mammographic image interpretation, remote sensing of the Earth, robotics, speech recognition, character recognition and document processing, image coding, personal identity verification, and image and video retrieval from a database. Important contributions to statistical pattern recognition include k-nearest neighbor pattern classification methods, feature selection, contextual classification, probabilistic relaxation, and multiple expert fusion. In computer vision, the main contributions include robust statistical methods for shape analysis and detection, motion estimation and segmentation, image segmentation, and automatic multimodal video annotation. In medical informatics, he has worked on automatic EEG diagnosis and automatic detection of microcalcifications in digital mammograms. In biometrics, he has contributed to face detection and face recognition, the development of lip-based biometrics, the fusion of intramodal and multimodal biometric systems, the acquisition and distribution of biometric databases (XM2VTS, Banca), the organization of several face recognition competitions, and the fusion of biometric modalities. His recent interests include cognitive vision, transfer learning, anomaly detection, and most recently transformer architectures with self-learning.
Prof. Dr. Josiane Zerubia, Ph.D. is a distinguished scientist in the field of image processing and remote sensing applications. Her main research interest is image processing using probabilistic models. She is also interested in parameter estimation, statistical learning and optimization techniques, and artificial intelligence. Her papers are highly cited and she has been elected the IEEE Fellow, Fellow of EURASIP, and Fellow of IAPR for her scientific achievements. She has successfully supervised 35 PhD students and a large number of MSc students. She has served as an expert consultant to 30 major industrial companies such as TAS/AAS, Aérospatiale, Foundation EADS/Airbus Group, MBDA, Astrium/Airbus DS, CS, Akka Tech/Silogic, Galderma, L'Oréal, and Philips.
Dr. Radka Tezaur is a specialist in numerical mathematics with an application focus on computational photography, 3D computer vision and digital image processing. She combines rigorous basic research, which she has conducted for many years at universities in Australia and the USA, with the ability to put results into practice, which she has developed over the last decade working for technology giants Nikon and Intel. In addition to many research papers, she has authored and co-authored 20 US patents.