Marcello Pelillo

Marcello Pelillo is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Venice, Italy, where he leads the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Group. He held visiting research positions at Yale University, the University College London, McGill University, the University of Vienna, York University (UK), and the National ICT Australia (NICTA). He has published more than 150 technical papers in refereed journals, handbooks, and conference proceedings in the areas of computer vision, pattern recognition and neural computation. He serves (or has served) on the editorial board for the journals IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), IET Computer Vision, and Pattern Recognition, and is regularly on the program committees of the major international conferences and workshops of his fields. In 1997, he established a new series of international conferences devoted to energy minimization methods in computer vision and pattern recognition (EMMCVPR) which has now reached the tenth edition. He is (or has been) scientific coordinator of several research projects, including SIMBAD, an EU-FP7 project devoted to similarity-based pattern analysis and recognition. Prof. Pelillo is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IAPR.

In this talk I will describe an on-going Italian project which aims at developing innovative technological tools that enable visually impaired people to improve their “social sense-making” or, in other words, to deal more effectively with complex social relationships and environments. The main novelty of our proposal is that we aim to address, within a single integrated framework, aspects that pertain to the physical as well as the social dimension, under the assumption that both are indispensable to achieving satisfactory social integration. To this end, we plan to exploit multimedia and computer vision technologies, machine learning and audio signal processing, advanced wireless communication as well as mobile computer devices and interfaces. To cover a wide spectrum of needs and opportunities, we aim to use different devices such as wearable cameras, ambient cameras, smartphone, cameras, earphones, and tactile Braille interfaces. Our philosophy will be to design and implement low-cost architectural solutions that are as non-obtrusive and as friendly as possible to the visually impaired, not only to make him/her feel at ease with them but also to avoid erecting psychological barriers that would hamper social integration.