![[Gerasimos Potamianos]](PICONS/Potamianos.jpg)
Gerasimos (Makis) Potamianos was born in Athens, Greece, in 1965. He received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1988, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. His thesis focused on Markov random fields for image processing, under the supervision of Professor John Goutsias, faculty with the Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory (currently with the Center for Imaging Science).
From the fall of 1994 till the summer of 1996, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at the Johns Hopkins University, where he investigated decision tree based language models. From August 1996 till August 1999, he has been a Senior Member of Technical Staff with the then Speech and Image Processing Services Laboratory at AT&T Labs-Research, in Murray Hill and Florham Park, New Jersey, working on audio-visual automatic speech recognition and synthesis. In September 1999, he joined the Human Language Technologies Department (currently Multilingual Analytics and User Technologies) at IBM Research at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he eventually became Manager of the Multimodal Conversational Solutions Department. At IBM, he has continued research on audio-visual speech, with emphasis placed on multisensory and multimodal speech processing in smart spaces and ambient intelligence environments, within the framework of European Union funded projects CHIL, DICIT, and NETCARITY. In October 2008, Makis joined the Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH, in Heraklion, Greece, as an Associate Researcher, where he has continued his research activities in multimodal and multisensory processing of speech with emphasis in ambient intelligence environments, within the Ambient Intelligence Programme of the Institute. Following a six-month stay at FORTH, in April 2009 he joined the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT) at the National Center for Scientific Research (NCSR), "Demokritos" in Athens, Greece as a Research Director. Among his research activities there, he has worked on EU-funded projects SYNC3, AVISPIRE, and INDIGO. Finally, in February 2012 he joined the Department of Computer and Communication Engineering at the University of Thessaly, in Volos, Greece, as an Associate Professor. In addition to his teaching duties there, he has continued his research collaboration with NCSR "Demokritos" as part of project AVISPIRE, as well as with the Information Analysis and Modeling Unit (IAMU) of Research Center "Athena" in Greece, as part of EU-funded project DIRHA.
Several highlights on Makis' work include his participation at the Johns Hopkins CLSP Summer Workshop (WS'00) on audio-visual speech recognition, teaching at the 2001 ELSNET summer school, a tutorial at ICIP 2003, plenary talks at AVSP 2003 and VisHCI 2006, panel participation at MMSP 2006, an invited talk at ASRU 2009, and serving as a guest editor of special issues of the EURASIP JASP 2002, IEEE TASLP 2009, and IEEE TMM 2011 journals. He also received the best paper award at ICME 2005 and was co-author of the best student paper at Interspeech 2007. He has also served as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2009-2011).
Makis' research interests span the areas of multimodal speech processing with applications to human-computer interaction and ambient intelligence, with particular emphasis on audio-visual speech processing, automatic speech recognition, multimedia signal processing and fusion, as well as computer vision for human detection and tracking. He has published about 100 articles in these areas that have received over 800 citations and has seven patents granted. He is a member of IEEE and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.
More details, including a list of publications, patents, professional activities, and citations of Makis' work can be found in his RESUME.