Dr Stavri Nikolov is the Founding Director of the Digital Spaces Living Lab (www.digitalspaces.info) in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is also co-founder and Head of Research of Attentive Displays Ltd (www.attentivedisplays.com) and co-founder and Principal Technology Adviser of Imagga Ltd (www.imagga.com). Attentive Displays Ltd is a leading provider of consultancy, system integration and software development services in the field of attentive displays, interactive advertising, eye-tracking based systems, and data and information visualisation solutions. Imagga Ltd is a company that develops and offers technologies, services, and online tools, for visual image search and image processing in the cloud. In the past, Dr Nikolov was also a Senior Scientist (Digital Identity and Information Search) at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) of the European Commission in Seville, Spain, and a Senior Research Fellow in Image Processing at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published more than 70 refereed or invited papers, including eight invited book chapters, and also numerous technical reports on image processing, interactive systems and information search and visualisation. He has also given many invited lectures around the world. Dr Nikolov is the creator and co-ordinator of The Online Resource for Research in Image Fusion (www.imagefusion.org) and The Online Archive of Scanpath Data (www.scanpaths.org).

Dr Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris is a Senior Researcher (Researcher B’) with the Informatics and Telematics Institute. His research interests include semantic multimedia analysis, indexing and retrieval, Web 2.0 content analysis, knowledge structures, reasoning and personalization for multimedia applications. He received his Ph.D. degree in 3-D model based image sequence coding from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2001. He is the co-author of 48 papers in refereed journals, 27 book chapters, 4 patents and more than 150 papers in international conferences. He is co- editor of the book “Semantic Multimedia and Ontologies: Theory and Applications”, the guest editor of four special issues and he has served as a program committee member and regular reviewer for a number of international journals and conferences. He has been the co-organizer of various conferences and workshops, such as the ACM CIVR, WIAMIS and SSMS. He is the coordinator of the SocialSensor - Sensing User Generated Input for Improved Media Discovery and Experience, European Integrated Project. He has been appointed as Chair of the Technical Committee 14 of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR-TC14, “Signal Analysis for Machine Intelligence”). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM.

Symeon Papadopoulos is a Research Associate with the Informatics and Telematics Insitute (ITI) since 2006. His current research interests pertain to information retrieval, data mining and multimedia analysis on the Social Web. He received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece in 2004. In 2006, he received the Professional Doctorate in Engineering (P.D.Eng.) from the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In 2009, he completed a distance-learning MBA degree in the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Currently, he is working towards the completion of his Ph.D. on the topic of information extraction from large-scale social content, in the Informatics department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Georgi Kadrev is a co-founder and managing director of Imagga Ltd. Georgi has a long-lasting passion and extensive experience with regards to image analysis and its many applications. His first pet project, Easy Morphing, was dedicated to image transformations and morphing, winning many national student awards in Bulgaria between 2001 and 2003. In August 2008 Georgi founded Imagga Ltd aiming to popularise and commercialize various image understanding technologies and to demonstrate their potential to transform different application areas. Imagga successfully offers its technologies on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis and also runs a stock photography market (www.StockPodium.com).

Stanimira Jelezova is a Lead Software Engineer at Astea Solutions AD and one of the leading architects of Broadcastr. Broadcastr (beta.broadcastr.com) is a revolutionary Social Media platform for making and managing location-based stories. It enables recording, indexing, hearing, and sharing audio content. Stanimira’s team has built a brilliant distributed architecture capable of handling the huge resources needed by a geo-searching multimedia framework running in browsers and on mobile devices. Stanimira is also developing applications for e-publishing of multimedia-enhanced, interactive books. She is a teaching assistant in various technological courses at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University, where she also participates in a number of scientific research projects.

Marina Tsvetinova is a software analyst at Astea Solutions AD, where she coordinates agile software processes, handles client management, and works on validating functional requirements. Marina has a degree in Graphic design and as a part of her work she creates identity and interface designs. Before Astea, Marina specialized as a graphic designer at one of the leading global providers of mobile marketing and advertising solutions.

Konstantin Christoff is the managing director of Favit Network and the co-ordinator of all regional managers for the countries where Favit operates, i.e. Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Russia and Turkey at present. Konstantin is in charge of developing and implementing of the successful bussines model of Favit and its global strategy. He graduated from the Plovdiv German language high school, studied management in Leipzig, and spesialised marketing in UNWE, Sofia. His professional career started in 1997 in Chemsearch, followed by work for Citrigroup. Prior to starting Interactive Media and Favit Network, Konstantin held managerial positions in the biggest outsourcing company in Bulgaria – Wizcom (at present VM Ware Bulgaria), and Bluevizia, a division of Icygen.