Others

Committees

• Co-chair of international conferences
  • Co-chair of WBICV2017, Catania, Italy, Sep 2017
  • Co-chair of REACTS2017, Ystad, Sweden, Aug 2017
  • Co-chair of CMVC2015, New York City, New York, Aug 2015
  • Co-chair of CAIP2015, Valletta, Malta, Sep 2015
  • Co-chair of REACTS2015, Valletta, Malta, Sep 2015
  • General co-chair of the 1^st international workshop on Computational Models of Visual Cortex (CMVC) as part of the 9^th International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies (formerly BIONETICS), 3-5 Dec, New York City, New York, USA.
  • General co-chair of the 16^th international CAIP 2015 conference, 2-4 Sep, Valletta, Malta

• Member of international conference program committees
  • ICANN2014, CAIP2015, IC2IT2015, CAIP2017, REACTS2015, REACTS2017, NIPS2016, NIPS2017

• PhD Promotions
  • Examiner of Irene Schiza, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Jun 2018
  • Co-promotor of the Defense Committee of Jiapan Guo , University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Dec 2017
  • Examiner of Maria Papaioannou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus, May 2017
  • Co-promotor of the Defense Committee of Nicola Strisciuglio, University of Salerno, Italy, Feb 2017.
  • Examiner of Sergio Garrido Jurado, University of Cordoba, Spain, Nov 2016.
  • Co-promotor of the Defense Committee of Andreas Neocleous, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Dec 2016

• Editorial
  • Associate editor of the Elsevier journal Pattern Recognition (Q1)
  • Member of the Editorial Board of the Information Open Source Journal
  • Co-editor of the CAIP2015 Proceedings published by Springer in two volumes: Part 1 and Part 2
  • Co-editor of the Special issue on selected papers from CAIP 2015 on the journal Machine Vision and Application by Springer, 2015
  • Editor of Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems (PRIS) journal

• Others
  • External examiner of two MSc projects from Makerere University, Uganda, 2014
  • Session chair in BrainComp 2013
  • Ad-hoc reviewer of various computer science journals

Media

• • • Proposed project for a Computer Aided Diagnostic System for the detection of Diabetic Retinopathy in Retinal Fundus Images
      • 16-02-2016: Newsbook
      • 13-02-2016: Times of Malta
    • Interviews about Machine Learning in Smart Breeding
      • 15-12-2015: Radio Malta 1
      • 15-11-2015: University of Malta

Talks

• 1. Invited Speaker at the University of Muenster, Germany, 6 July 2017
  2. Invited Speaker at Valletta.AI meeting, Malta, 19 April 2017
  3. Invited Keynote talk at the CIARP conference, Lima, Peru, November, 2016.
  4. Tutorial at the CMVC Workshop in the BICT conference, New York, USA, December, 2015.
  5. Invited talk at the BrainComp conference, Cetraro, Calabria, Italy, July 2015. [Abstract]
  6. Invited talk at the Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, May 2015. Title: Combination Of Receptive Fields (CORF): A novel computational simple cell model with application to contour detection and delineation.
  7. Invited talk at the congress of clinical applications of smart glasses, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Dec 2014. Title: Trainable object localization and recognition
  8. Invited talk at MIRA Institute, Twente University, Enschede, The Netherlands, Oct 2014. Title: Object recognition and localization
  9. Invited talk at Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Sep 2014. Title: Computational modeling of simple cells with applications to contour detection in natural images and vessel delineation in retinal images
  10. Invited talk at Intelligent and Interactive Systems, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Jan 2014. Title: CORF: A computational model of simple cell with push-pull inhibition
  11. Invited talk at Juelich Forschungszentrum, Germany, 2012. Title: Brain-inspired computing for machine vision: Trainable COSFIRE filters for keypoint detection and pattern recognition
  12. A lecture called “Brain-inspired computer vision: what comes beyond V2 in visual cortex?” as part of the ASCI course a8: Front-End Vision and Multi-Scale Image Analysis, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e), Autumn 2011. [lecture]
  13. “Automatic detection of retinal vascular bifurcations by trainable V4-like filters”, Spring 2011 Meeting of the NVPHBV, Utrecht, The Netherlands, April 2011.
  14. Invited Talk by the British Computer Science (BCS Essex branch), at Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford, Essex UK. Title: Biologically Motivated Pattern Recognition, 15^th March 2011.

Summer Schools

As a lecturer:

• 1. Fifth International Summer School on Brain-inspired Computer Vision, Shenyang, China: 27-31 July 2015

As a PhD student:

• 2. ICVSS – International Computer Vision Summer School, Siracusa, Sicily: 11-16^th July 2011.
  3. AERFAI Summer School on Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning in Multimedia Systems, Benicassim, Spain: 7-11^th June 2010.

Organized Seminars

• 1. Supercomputers and Brain-Inspired Machine Vision, St. Martin’s Institute, Malta: 10th April 2012.
     • “Computational models of the visual system”, Prof. Dr. Nicolai Petkov, [pdf]
     • “Brain-inspired algorithms for computer vision”, George Azzopardi, [pdf]
     • “Supercomputers: the road to exascale computing”, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, [pdf 1], [pdf 2]
  2. Robot Intelligence: How do robots learn and see?, St. Martin’s Institute, Malta: 14th April 2011.
     • “Contour detection by surround suppression of texture”, Prof. Dr. Nicolai Petkov
     • “Matrix Relevance Learning: basic concepts and applications in medicine”, Prof. Dr. Michael Biehl
     • “Trainable V4-like filters for the detection of vascular bifurcations in retinal images”, George Azzopardi