He is a tenured professor of information technology with Politehnica University of Bucharest (UPB), Romania, and leader/founder of the AI Multimedia Lab. He holds a double PhD in video processing from UPB and University of Savoie, France. His research interests cover Artificial Intelligence algorithms, i.e., machine learning, deep learning, information retrieval, for various multimedia applications. He authored/co-authored so far over 240 scientific publications. He serves/served as reviewer for top tier journals and conferences, as associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, as lead editor for the Springer books on Fusion in Computer Vision and Human Perception of Visual Information, as guest editor for journal special issues, as conference chair/committee, including general chair for the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing CBMI 2016, the 17th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval ICMR 2017, and the 12th CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum 2021, as organizer/co-organizer of workshops, as lead organizer/co-organizer for several benchmark campaigns including the ImageCLEF Multimedia Retrieval in CLEF. He is a senior member of IEEE and member of SPIE, ACM, EURASIP and GDR-ISIS. He contributed to over 35 national/international research grants, strategic programmes, and industry projects with leading companies such as Keysight Technologies, NXP Semiconductors, Xperi/FotoNation, out of which, to 21 as principal investigator with over 36M Euros in funding. He also has a long-time experience in coordinating and managing educational and research groups, as director of the Doctoral School of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology at UPB, as administrative coordinator of the CAMPUS Research Institute at UPB, as director of the Politehnica Research & Development and Innovation Institute, or as member of the National Council for Attestation of University Degrees, Diplomas and Certificates, and National Council for Ethics and Management in Higher Education, at the Ministry of National Education, Romania.