Riccardo Leonardi received the Diploma and Ph.D.degrees in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland,in 1984 and 1987, respectively. After spending one year with the Information Research Laboratory at University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), he joined Bell Laboratories for a period of 3 years as a Memberof Technical Staff. In 1991, he returned briefly to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology before being appointed in 1992 at the University of Brescia to lead research and teaching in the field of telecommunications. His main research interests cover the field of multimedia signal processing applications, with a specific expertise on visual communications, and content-based analysis of audio-visual information. He has published more than 200 papers on these topics. Prof. Riccardo Leonardi has been coordinating several national and international initiatives to conduct research and doctoral training at both National and International levels (US, Europe, South America, ...).