He holds a double PhD in image/video processing from UPB and University of Savoie, France. He authored over 180 scientific publications. He serves/served as: reviewer for top tier journals, e.g., IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, ACM Computing Surveys, and conferences, e.g., ACM Multimedia, ACM Multimedia Systems Conference, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval; associate editor for ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications; lead editor for the Springer books on Fusion in Computer Vision: Understanding Complex Visual Content and Human Perception of Visual Information: Psychological and Computational Perspectives; guest editor for journal special issues, e.g., with Elsevier Image and Vision Computing, Springer Multimedia Tools and Applications; conference committee chair, e.g., proceedings/publicity co-chair and area chair @ ACM Multimedia, general chair @ IEEE/ACM International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing 2016, ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval 2017, and CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum 2021; organizer/co-organizer of workshops, e.g., Information Fusion in Computer Vision for Concept Recognition @ European Conference on Computer Vision, Event-based Media Integration and Processing, and Human-Centered Event Understanding from Multimedia @ ACM Multimedia; lead organizer/co-organizer for several benchmark campaigns, e.g., MediaEval Retrieving Diverse Social Images, Violent Scenes Detection, Predicting Media Interestingness, and Predicting Media Memorability; lead organizer for ImageCLEF starting with 2017 and co-organizer of the Detection and Recognition of Hand Drawn Website UIs task; co-organizer of the Multimedia Information Processing for Personality and Social Networks Analysis challenge and workshop @ IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition. He contributed to over 28 national/international research grants, strategic programmes, and industry projects, out of which to 16 as principal investigator. He is senior member of IEEE and member of SPIE, ACM, EURASIP and GDR-ISIS.