Tampere University, located in Tampere Finland, has joined with the Center for Big Learning to establish international cooperation within the center. Dr. Moncef Gabbouj from Tampere University and Matti Vakkuri from Haltian Oy attended the CBL Semi-Annual meeting in May and a ceremonial signing of the agreement between the Universities. Dr. Gabbouj will be the CBL Site Director for Tampere, and we look forward to his involvement and insight for growing the center.

The CBL also gains a number of International Industry partners with this agreement. We would like to welcome Haltian, Tietoevry, Dead Set Bit, Xiaomi Finland, and Valtra.

Dr. Moncef Gabbouj received his BS degree in 1985 from Oklahoma State University, and his MS and PhD degrees from Purdue University, in 1986 and 1989, respectively, all in electrical engineering. Dr. Gabbouj is a Professor of Information Technology at the Department of Computing Sciences, Tampere University. His research interests include Big Data analytics, multimedia content-based analysis, indexing and retrieval, artificial intelligence, machine learning, pattern recognition, nonlinear signal and image processing and analysis, voice conversion, and video processing and coding. Dr. Gabbouj is a Fellow of the IEEE and member of the Academia Europaea and the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He is the past Chairman of the IEEE CAS TC on DSP and committee member of the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing. He served as associate editor and guest editor of many IEEE, and international journals and Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE CASS. Dr. Gabbouj served as General Co-Chair of IEEE ISCAS 2019, ICIP 2020, ICIP 2024 and ICME 2021. Gabbouj is Finland Site Director of the USA NSF IUCRC funded Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI) and led the Artificial Intelligence Research Task Force of Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment funded Research Alliance on Autonomous Systems (RAAS).