Dr. Shah has been with the University of Central Florida since 1986, where he is currently a Professor of Computer Science, and the director of Computer Vision lab. He has served as a project director for the national site for REU, Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Vision , funded by the National Science Foundation for the last ten years. Prof. Shah has published one book, Motion-Based Recognition, and over 70 research papers in refereed journals and conferences on topics including visual motion, gesture recognition, lipreading, edge and contour detection, multisensor fusion, shape from shading and stereo, and hardware algorithms for computer vision.

Prof. Bourbakis is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments. He is the Associate Director of the Center on Intelligent Systems (for Industry-Government and Academic Partnerships) and the Director of the AI&Machine Vision Research Lab at T.J. Watson School, SUNY-Binghamton. His research interests are in Applied Artificial Intelligence(Image, Speech & Natural Language Understanding), Intelligent Robotics, Image and Video Processing, and High Performance Distributed Computing. He has published more than 200 articles in refereed Journals and Conference Proceedings, and has given 8 Ph.D.s in the above areas. He is an author/co-author/editor of 10 books in his areas of expertise.

Prof. Kakadiaris is a assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Houston. His research focuses on developing algorithms, techniques and systems that increase our understanding on data interrogation and information extraction using Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. The research problems that he tackles are drawn from three general areas: human motion analysis and synthesis, biomedical data modeling, analysis and simulation, and seismic data analysis. Examples of such problems include human motion capture for vision-based user interfaces and teleoperation, computer-aided surgery planning and delivery, and investigation of geoscientific data. He was recently appointed as director of the Virtual Environment Research Institute (VERI) at the University of Houston.

Dr. James R. Gattiker is a staff member in the Nonproliferation and International Security Division, Safeguards and Systems group, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Gattiker's background includes image analysis, knowledge systems, data mining, information analysis, and modeling and simulation research and applications. His current work is in applying information integration techniques in multi-sensor systems for two main projects automated surveillance for nuclear materials safeguards, safety, and security enhancement; and interpretation of remote sensor data for functional characterization of difficult targets.

Dr. Bahram Parvin is the head of Imaging and Collaborative Computing at the Computing Sciences of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the architect of DeepView and has developed a number of vision-based algorithms for on-line microscopy. He performs research in computer vision, collaboratory computing, and intelligent system design.

Dr. Chandrika Kamath's current research interests are in the area of large-scale data mining and pattern recognition. Her interests span all aspects of the field, including image processing, feature extraction, dimension reduction, and classification and clustering algorithms. She is also interested in the practical application of these techniques to scientific data sets that result from experiments, observations, and simulations. In the past, Chandrika was involved in high performance scalable computing, especially in the solution of large, sparse, systems of linear equations. Since January 1998, Chandrika has been the project lead and an individual contributor for Sapphire, a project in large scale data mining and pattern recognition.

Dr. Pavlidis holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minessota. He has been with Honeywell Labs since 1997. His expertise is in the areas of Computer Vision Beyond the Visible Spectrum and Pattern Recognition of Highly Variable Patterns. Dr. Pavlidis has publised extensively in these areas in major journals and refereed conference proceedings over the past several years. He is the co-chair of the IEEE series of Workshops in Computer Vision Beyond the Visible Spectrum. He is a Fulbright Fellow and a senior member of IEEE.

Steve Rehfeldt has been with Graphco Technologies, Inc. (G-TEC) since June 2000, after G-TEC acquired Law Enforcement Services, a division of a GTE subsidiary. Prior to working for G-TEC, he applied biometric technologies and developed software architecture for GTE's Law Enforcement Services. He came to GTE from an eight-year career in software engineering where he performed end to end telecom network management systems architecture, development, and field work. Responsible for the overall technology direction, architecture, and the successful completion of development and field projects, he provides technical and system vision for the creation of G-TEC products. Rehfeldt has assisted in Department of Defense studies of both virtual reality and simulation research at the Institute for Simulation and Training in Orlando, Florida. He holds a bachelors degree in computer engineering (BSCpe) from the University of Central Florida. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force where he served as a crypto-linguist for the Korean language.

Mr. Connors is currently Vice-President for SecurLinx Inc. SecurLinx Develops and provides secure database and communication system solutions combining knowledge management expertise featuring an advanced facial biometric system (FaceTrac) that identifies individuals by their facial features. Other SecurLinx systems provide authentication technologies, human-machine interface technology, web tools and secure data storage facilities to provide secure systems and services for exchange environments and virtual communities. The company's biometric and knowledge-sharing systems are provided to law enforcement, government and industry. Mr. Connors is a retired Chief of Police/Sheriff from Anaconda, Montana after serving thirty years in law enforcement. A graduate of the F.B.I.. National Academy (Quantico, Va.), Federal Law Enforcement Academy (Glynco, Ga.). He is a graduate of the University of Montana (1965) with a B.A. in Sociology/Criminology and an A.A. in Computer Science (1994). Mr. Connors remains very active in computer forensics with law enforcement associations and is a member of the Nevada Attorney General High-Tech Crime Task Force.

Dr. Kentaro Toyama is with the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research. His work is primarily in the area of Vision-Based Interfaces, which apply techniques of computer vision to novel human-computer interfaces. His current research interests include person tracking, facial image analysis, and related topics in computer vision.

Dr. Ara Nefian is a Staff Researcher at Intel's Microprocessor Research Lab in Santa Clara. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999. Dr. Nefian's work experience includes three years as an associate engineer at NCR, the Human Interface Technology Center where he was involved in several video and image processing projects. In his Ph.D. work, he focused on the theory of two-dimensional hidden Markov models with applications in face detection and recognition. This research resulted in US and European patents for real time face detection in uncontrolled environments. His research interests are in the general area of computer vision, signal and image processing, pattern recognition, statistical machine learning and signal modeling. Current research includes the theory of two-dimensional hidden Markov models and applications for face recognition, detection, segmentation, and tracking.

Dr. Miller is the project leader for Distributed Intelligence and also responsible for the Visual Computing Laboratory. His project has direct links to vehicle safety in which optical recognition etc are critical areas for pre-crash sensing. He is currently working on low light camera design for in-vehicle applications as well as image recognition.

Dr. Anya Tascillo is a Technical Specialist in Artificial Intelligence and Signal Processing at Ford Motor Company's Scientific Research Laboratory. She applies nonlinear algorithms, especially neural networks, to applications varying from robotics to engine control to diagnostics to weather prediction.

Dr. Nikos Paragios is a research scientist at the Imaging and Visualization department of Siemens Corporate Research. Prior to his current affiliation, he spent three years with the Computer Vision and Robotics Group (RobotVis) of INRIA Sophia Antipoils, France. He holds a Ph.D. (2000) with the highest honors in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France and a M.Sc. (1996) and B.Sc. (1994) in computer science from the University of Crete, Greece. He is active in the area of computer vision and image processing and has published more than 30 articles in refereed Journals and Conference Proceedings.