Biosketch

Petros Maragos received the M.Eng. Diploma in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, in 1980, and the M.Sc.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, in 1982 and 1985.

In 1985 he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering, affiliated with the interdisciplinary Harvard Robotics Lab. He has also been a consultant to several industry research groups including Xerox’s research and products on document image analysis and Bellcore’s systems for video processing. In 1993 he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech and its Center for Signal and Image Processing. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing in Athens. In Fall 1998 he joined the faculty of the National Technical University of Athens, where he has been working as professor of electrical and computer engineering, and also as principal investigator of research projects at its Institute of Communication and Computer Systems. In 1999 he founded the Computer Vision, Speech Communication & Signal Processing Group/Lab. Since 2008 he is the director of the NTUA Lab on Intelligent Robotics and Automation. He has also served for ten years as the director of the NTUA ECE Division of Signals, Control and Robotics. He has held visiting positions at: MIT during Fall 2012 as visiting scientist with the Lab of Information and Decision Systems; University of Pennsylvania during Fall 2016 as visiting professor at the Dept. of Computer and Information Science; University of Southern California during Fall 2023 as distinguished visitor at the Ming Hsieh Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering. During 2012-2022 he was the scientific director of the Robot Perception and Interaction Unit and from 2023 the co-founder and acting director of the new Robotics Institute at the Athena Research & Innovation Center. His current research and teaching interests include the general areas of signals and systems theory, computer vision and image processing, audio-speech & language processing, machine learning, and robotics. In the above areas he has authored or co-authored more than 400 publications as journal papers, book chapters and conference proceeding articles. The citations to his work can be found at Google Scholar. He has co-edited three Springer research books, one on multimodal processing and interaction and two on shape analysis. He has also been the principal investigator and/or scientific director of more than 50 USA and European/Greek research projects.

He has served as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, as well as editorial board member and guest editor for several other journals on signal processing, image analysis and computer vision. He has served as a member of the IEEE DSP, IMDSP and MMSP technical committees, the IEEE SPS Education Board, and the Conference Board. He has served as general chair or co-chair for several international conferences, including the 1992 SPIE Conf. on Visual Communications & Image Processing; 1996 Int’l Symposium on Mathematical Morphology & Its Applications to Image Processing; 2007 IEEE Int’l Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing; 2010 European Conf. on Computer Vision (program chair); ECCV-2010 Workshop on Sign, Gesture & Activity; 2011, 2014 and 2018 Dagstuhl Symposia on Shape Analysis; IROS-2015 Workshop on Cognitive Mobility Assistance Robots; general co-chair of EUSIPCO-2017; 2022 IEEE IVMSP Workshop; and general chair of ICASSP-2023. He has also served as a member of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology and the Scientific Council for Mathematics & Information Sciences.

Dr. Maragos is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards for his academic work, including a 1987-1992 US National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award; the 1988 IEEE ASSP Society’s Young Author Best Paper Award; the 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award; the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award for the most outstanding original paper in all IEEE publications; the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society’s Honorable Mention Award for best paper; the CVPRW-2011 Gesture Recognition Best Paper Award; the ECCVW-2020 Data Modeling Challenge Winner Award; CVPR-2022 best paper finalist; the PETRA-2023 best paper for novelty award. In 1995 he was elected Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to the theory and application of nonlinear signal processing systems. He is the recipient of the 2007 EURASIP Technical Achievements Award for contributions to nonlinear signal processing and systems theory, image processing, and speech processing. In 2010 he was elected Fellow of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) for his research contributions. He has been elected IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer for 2017-2018. Since 2023 he is a Life Fellow of IEEE.