Lamberto Ballan: Curriculum Vitae

Lamberto Ballan , Ph.D.
Curriculum Vitae – Updated: October 2, 2014
Personal details
Place of Birth: Firenze, Italy
Nationality: Italian
Residence: Mountain View, CA, USA
Marital Status: Married, one daughter
Contact
Stanford University
lballan@cs.stanford.edu
Università degli Studi di Firenze
lamberto.ballan@unifi.it
www.lambertoballan.net
Education
• 2011, April: Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Multimedia and Telecommunication, Università degli
Studi di Firenze, Italy.
Thesis: “Object and event recognition in multimedia archives using local visual features”.
Advisors: Prof. A. Del Bimbo and Dr. M. Bertini.
• 2006, December: Laurea Degree (5 years degree, M.S. equivalent) in Computer Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy.
• 1999: High School Degree, I.T.C. “A. Volta”, Bagno a Ripoli (FI), Italy.
Professional Experience
• 2014/10 – present: Marie Curie Fellow (postdoc), Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Working on large-scale image understanding and social network analysis; Advisor: Prof. Fei-Fei Li.
• 2011/01 – 2014/09: Postdoctoral Fellow, Media Integration and Communication Center, Università
degli Studi di Firenze, Italy.
Working on image/video annotation and tag refinement; Advisor: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
• 2010/04 – 2010/07: Visiting Ph.D. Student, Signal and Image Processing Department, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunication (ENST), Paris, France.
Working on Context-Dependent Kernels for visual recognition; Advisor: Dr. Hichem Sahbi.
• 2008/01 – 2010/12: Ph.D. Student, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy.
• 2007/03 – 2007/12: Research Assistant, Media Integration and Communication Center, Università
degli Studi di Firenze, Italy.
Working on logo recognition in sports videos; Advisor: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
• 2004/01 – 2004/07: Applications Developer (part time while in college), CSIAF, Università degli
Studi di Firenze, Italy.
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Honors, Awards and Scholarships
• Marie Curie IOF, International Outgoing Fellowship, of the European Commission (call EU FP7
PEOPLE 2013 - accept. rate 13%); the grant award amounts to around 272K Euro for three years.
Project: “EAGLE: Exploiting semAntic and social knowledGe for visuaL rEcognition” (623930).
Advisors: Prof. A. Del Bimbo (Università di Firenze) and Prof. Fei-Fei Li (Stanford University, USA).
• Best Paper Award: 2nd ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Social Media (WSM), in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2010 [C10].
• MIUR Fellowship for pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Multimedia and Telecommunication at Università degli Studi di Firenze (XXIII cycle).
Participation in European and National Research Projects
• PITAGORA: “Piattaforma Integrata per la Gestione delle Operazioni Aeroportuali”, funded by the
Tuscany Region, Italy (2013/01 – 2014/07).
Role: researcher, WP-leader; Principal investigator: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
• euTV: “euTV, adaptive media channels”, European project IST FP7 226248 (2011/01 – 2012/06).
Role: researcher; Principal investigator: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
• IM3I: “Immersive Multimedia Interfaces”, European project IST FP7 222267 (2010/07 – 2010/11).
Role: researcher; Principal investigator: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
• FreeSURF: “FREE Surveillance in a pRivacy-respectFul way”, funded by the Italian Ministry of
Research and Education, MIUR PRIN (2008/05 – 2008/07).
Role: researcher; Principal investigator: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
• VIDI-Video: “Interactive Semantic Video Search With a Large Thesaurus of Machine-Learned AudioVisual Concepts”, European project IST FP6 045547 (2007/03 – 2009/12).
Role: researcher; Principal investigator: Prof. A. Del Bimbo.
Participation in Technology Transfer Research Projects
• STAMAT: “Social Topics and Media Analysis Tool”, research grant by a private company: Università
degli studi di Firenze – Telecom Italia s.p.a. (2012/01 – 2012/12). Role: researcher and developer.
• “Automatic recognition of advertising trademarks in sports videos”, research grant by a private
company: Università degli studi di Firenze – Sport System Europe s.r.l. (2007/03 – 2009/06). Role:
researcher and developer.
Professional Activities and Academic Service
• Editorial Board Member:
– International Journal on Computer Vision and Signal Processing (since May 2011).
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• Workshop Co-Organizer:
– 2nd International Workshop on Web-scale Vision and Social Media (VSM), in conjunction with Int’l Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 28/6/2014, Columbus, OH (USA);
– 1st International Workshop on Web-scale Vision and Social Media (VSM), in conjunction with European
Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 7/10/2012, Firenze (Italy).
• Tutorial Co-Organizer/Instructor:
– Hands on Advanced Bag-of-Words Models for Visual Object Recognition, in conjunction with Int’l Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 24/8/2014, Stockholm (Sweden);
– Hands on Advanced Bag-of-Words Models for Visual Object Recognition, in conjunction with Int’l Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP), 9/9/2013, Napoli (Italy).
• Technical Program Committee Member:
– IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 9-11/2/2015, Anaheim, CA (USA);
– ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia (ACM-MM), 3-7/11/2014, Orlando, FL (USA);
– IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 14-18/7/2014, Chengdu (China);
– Int’l Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 24-28/8/2014, Stockholm (Sweden);
– Int’l Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP), 5-8/1/2014, Lisbon (Portugal);
– IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 16-18/6/2014, Newport Beach, CA (USA);
– ACM Int’l Conf Internet Multimedia Computing and Service (ICIMCS), 10-12/7/2014, Xiamen (China);
– 1st Workshop on Big Data Computer Vision, co-located with CVPR, 24/6/2013, Portland, OR (USA);
– IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 15-19/7/2013, San Jose, CA (USA);
– IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 16-18/9/2013, Irvine, CA (USA);
– ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), 26/2/2013-1/3/2013, Oslo (Norway);
– ACM Int’l Conf Internet Multimedia Computing and Service (ICIMCS), 17-19/8/2013, Huangshan (China);
– 2nd Workshop on Multimedia for Cultural Heritage, co-located with ICIAP, 10/9/2013, Napoli (Italy);
– IEEE Int’l Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP), 9-11/12/2013, Waknaghat (India);
– ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia (ACM-MM), 29/10/2012-2/11/2012, Nara (Japan);
– European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 7-13/10/2012, Firenze (Italy);
– IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 19-21/9/2012, Palermo (Italy);
– ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 17-20/4/2011, Trento (Italy);
– 2nd Int’l Workshop on Analysis and Retrieval of Tracked Events and Motion in Imagery Streams (ARTEMIS),
co-located with ICCV, 12/11/2011, Barcelona (Spain).
• Local Technical Committee Member:
– European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2012, 7-13/10/2012, Firenze (Italy);
– ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia (ACM-MM) 2010, 25-29/10/2010, Firenze (Italy).
• Reviewer (Journals):
– IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI);
– IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM);
– IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT);
– IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS);
– Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR);
– Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU) - Elsevier;
– Pattern Recognition (PR) - Elsevier;
– Image and Vision Computing - Elsevier;
– Pattern Recognition Letters (PRL) - Elsevier;
– Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) - Springer;
– Signal Processing: Image Communication - Elsevier;
– Neurocomputing - Elsevier;
– Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation - Elsevier;
– Pattern Analysis and Applications (PAA) - Springer;
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– Int’l Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (MMIR) - Springer;
– Int’l Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics - Springer;
– Journal of Web Semantics - Elsevier;
– EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing.
• Reviewer (Conferences):
– Computer Vision: Int’l Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2013–2014; European
Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2012; British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2012-2013;
– Pattern Recognition and Image Processing: Int’l Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2008–
2012; IEEE Int’l Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2008–2010; Int’l Conference on Image Analysis
and Processing (ICIAP) 2007–2013; Int’l Conf. on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP) 2009,
2011;
– Multimedia: ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia (ACM-MM) 2008–2013; IEEE Int’l Conference on
Multimedia & Expo (ICME) 2008–2013; ACM Int’l Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR)/MIR/CIVR
2007-2013: IEEE Int’l Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) 2009–2010; IEEE Int’l
Workshop on Image Analysis Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) 2009–2010.
Affiliations
• CVF Member, The Computer Vision Foundation - an international non-profit organization that fosters and supports research in all aspects of computer vision (2013/03 – present).
• ACM Member, Association for Computing Machinery (2008/01 – present).
• GIRPR Member, the Italian chapter of IAPR (2008/09 – present).
• IEEE Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2008/01 – 2013/12).
Seminars and Invited Talks
• “Social media annotation: from images to videos”, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, July 2013.
• “Video event classification using bag-of-words and string kernels”, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, CA, USA, April 2011.
• “Automatic trademark detection and recognition in sports videos”, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunication (ENST), Paris, France, March 2009.
• “Automatic trademark detection and recognition in sports videos”, MICC/DIIMT seminars, Università
degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, July 2008.
Teaching Experience
• Lecturer, “Recognition and classification of visual context” (short course), Ph.D. School on Information Engineering, School of Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, a.y. 2013/2014.
• Lecturer, “Lab. Disegno Industriale III” – Multimedia and web design laboratory, Bachelor in Industrial Design, School of Architecture, Università degli Studi di Firenze, a.y. 2010/2011.
• Teaching Assistant, “Database Multimediali” – Multimedia content analysis, Master in Computer
Engineering, School of Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, a.y. 2007/2008 – a.y. 2013/2014.
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• Teaching Assistant, “Progettazione e Produzione Multimediale” – Fundamentals of multimedia,
Bachelor in Computer Engineering, School of Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, a.y.
2010/2011.
Advising
• Co-advisor of Ph.D. students, Università degli Studi di Firenze:
– Tiberio Uricchio, 2012-2015 (XXVIII cycle).
• Co-advisor of 13 graduate students for their Master thesis, School of Engineering, Università degli
Studi di Firenze (since 2008).
• Co-advisor of 4 undergraduate students for their Bachelor thesis, School of Engineering, Università
degli Studi di Firenze (since 2008).
Languages
• Italian (native), English (advanced).
Technical Skills
• OS: Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
• Programming: C, C++, Java, Matlab/Octave, OpenCV, LIBSVM
• Tools: LATEX, UNIX Shell Scripts, SQL, HTML & CMS (e.g. Wordpress)
Publications
Bibliometric indices 1
• h-index: 13 (Google Scholar), 10 (Scopus)
• Number of citations: 590 (Google Scholar), 292 (Scopus)
— Journal Articles —
[A1] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Tiberio Uricchio, and Alberto Del Bimbo. Data-driven approaches
for social image and video tagging. Multimedia Tools and Applications, in press, 2014. [I.F.: 1.014,
ANVUR: B].
[A2] Irene Amerini, Lamberto Ballan, Roberto Caldelli, Alberto Del Bimbo, Luca Del Tongo, and Giuseppe
Serra. Copy-move forgery detection and localization by means of robust clustering with j-linkage.
Signal Processing: Image Communication, 28(6):659–669, Jul 2013. [IF: 1.286, ANVUR: B].
1 IF
= ISI Impact Factor, ANVUR = Journal ranking by the Italian ANVUR (2012).
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[A3] Hichem Sahbi, Lamberto Ballan, Giuseppe Serra, and Alberto Del Bimbo. Context-dependent logo
matching and recognition. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 22(3):1018–1031, Mar 2013. [IF:
3.199, ANVUR: A].
[A4] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Giuseppe Serra. Effective codebooks for human action representation and classification in unconstrained videos. IEEE
Transactions on Multimedia, 14(4):1234–1245, Aug 2012. [IF: 1.754, ANVUR: A].
[A5] Irene Amerini, Lamberto Ballan, Roberto Caldelli, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. A SIFTbased forensic method for copy-move attack detection and transformation recovery. IEEE Transactions
on Information Forensics and Security, 6(3):1099–1110, Sep 2011. [IF: 1.340, ANVUR: A].
[A6] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Giuseppe Serra. Event
detection and recognition for semantic annotation of video. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 51(1):279–
302, Jan 2011. (S. I. Multimedia Surveys by World Experts) [IF: 0.617, ANVUR: B].
[A7] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Video annotation and
retrieval using ontologies and rule learning. IEEE MultiMedia, 17(4):80–88, Oct-Dec 2010. [IF: 1.066,
ANVUR: B].
[A8] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Semantic annotation of
soccer videos by visual instance clustering and spatial/temporal reasoning in ontologies. Multimedia
Tools and Applications, 48(2):313–337, Jun 2010. [IF: 0.885, ANVUR: B].
[A9] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Video event classification
using string kernels. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 48(1):69–87, May 2010. (Special Issue on
Content Based Multimedia Indexing) [IF: 0.885, ANVUR: B].
— Book Chapters —
[B1] Lamberto Ballan, Lorenzo Seidenari, Giuseppe Serra, Marco Bertini, and Alberto Del Bimbo. Recognizing human actions by using effective codebooks and tracking. In Roberto Cipolla, Sebastiano
Battiato, and Giovanni Maria Farinella, editors, Advanced Topics in Computer Vision. Springer, 2013.
[B2] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Walter Nunziati, and Giuseppe Serra. Commercials and trademarks recognition. In Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Bernard Merialdo, and Shiguo Lian,
editors, TV Content Analysis: Techniques and Applications. CRC Press, Mar 2012.
— International Conferences and Workshops —
[C1] Lamberto Ballan*, Tiberio Uricchio*, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Alberto Del Bimbo. A cross-media
model for automatic image annotation. In Proc. of ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval
(ICMR), Glasgow, UK, Apr 2014. (* indicates equal contribution) [Oral].
[C2] Tiberio Uricchio, Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, and Alberto Del Bimbo. Evaluating temporal
information for social image annotation and retrieval. In Proc. of International Conference on Image
Analysis and Processing (ICIAP), Napoli, Italy, Sep 2013. [Poster].
[C3] Giuseppe Serra, Thomas Alisi, Marco Bertini, Lamberto Ballan, Alberto Del Bimbo, Laurent Walter
Goix, and Carlo Alberto Licciardi. Stamat: A framework for social topics and media analysis. In Proc.
of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), San Jose, CA, USA, Jul 2013. [Demo].
[C4] Tiberio Uricchio, Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, and Alberto Del Bimbo. An evaluation of nearestneighbor methods for tag refinement. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo
(ICME), San Jose, CA, USA, Jul 2013. [Poster].
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[C5] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Tiberio Uricchio, and Alberto Del Bimbo. Social media annotation. In Proc. of IEEE International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI), Veszprem,
Hungary, Jun 2013. [Invited].
[C6] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, A. M. Serain, Giuseppe Serra, and B. F. Zaccone. Combining generative and discriminative models for classifying social images from 101 object
categories. In Proc. of Int’l Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Tsukuba, JP, Nov 2012. [Poster].
[C7] Roberto Caldelli, Irene Amerini, Lamberto Ballan, Giuseppe Serra, Mauro Barni, and Andrea Costanzo.
On the effectiveness of local warping against SIFT-based copy-move detection. In Proc. of Int’l Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Proc. (ISCCSP), Roma, Italy, May 2012. [Invited].
[C8] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Enriching and localizing
semantic tags in internet videos. In Proc. of ACM Multimedia, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, Nov 2011. [Poster].
[C9] Irene Amerini, Lamberto Ballan, Roberto Caldelli, Alberto Del Bimbo, Luca Del Tongo, and Giuseppe
Serra. An image forensics tool for copy-move detection and localization. In Proc. of IEEE International
Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), Barcelona, Spain, Jul 2011. [Demo].
[C10] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Marco Meoni, and Giuseppe Serra. Tag
suggestion and localization in user-generated videos based on social knowledge. In Proc. of ACM
Multimedia International Workshop on Social Media (WSM), Firenze, Italy, Oct 2010. [Oral].
[C11] Irene Amerini, Lamberto Ballan, Roberto Caldelli, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Geometric tampering estimation by means of a sift-based forensic analysis. In Proc. of IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Dallas, TX, USA, Mar 2010. [Oral].
[C12] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Giuseppe Serra. Human action recognition and localization using spatio-temporal descriptors and tracking. In Proc. of
AI*IA Int’l Workshop on Pattern Recog. & Art. Intell. for Human Behaviour Anal. (PRAI*HBA), Reggio
Emilia, Italy, Dec 2009. [Oral].
[C13] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Giuseppe Serra. Recognizing human actions by fusing spatio-temporal appearance and motion descriptors. In Proc. of
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Cairo, Egypt, Nov 2009. [Poster].
[C14] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Giuseppe Serra. Effective codebooks for human action categorization. In Proc. of ICCV International Workshop on Videooriented Object and Event Classification (VOEC), Kyoto, Japan, Sep 2009. [Oral].
[C15] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Video event classification
using bag of words and string kernels. In Proc. of International Conference on Image Analysis and
Processing (ICIAP), Vietri sul Mare (SA), Italy, Sep 2009. [Oral].
[C16] Lamberto Ballan, Alessio Bazzica, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Deep
networks for audio event classification in soccer videos. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on
Multimedia & Expo (ICME), New York, NY, USA, Jun 2009. [Oral].
[C17] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Giuseppe Serra. Action categorization in
soccer videos using string kernels. In Proc. of IEEE International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia
Indexing (CBMI), Chania, Crete, Jun 2009. [Oral].
[C18] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, and Arjun Jain. A system for automatic detection and recognition
of advertising trademarks in sports videos. In Proc. of ACM International Conference on Multimedia
(MM), Vancouver, BC, Canada, Oct 2008. [Demo].
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[C19] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Arjun Jain. Automatic trademark detection and recognition in sport videos. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo
(ICME), Hannover, Germany, Jun 2008. [Oral].
[C20] Andrew D. Bagdanov, Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, and Alberto Del Bimbo. Trademark matching and retrieval in sports video databases. In Proc. of ACM International Workshop on Multimedia
Information Retrieval (MIR), Augsburg, Germany, Sep 2007. [Oral].
[C21] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Walter Nunziati. Soccer players identification based on visual local features. In Proc. of ACM International Conference on Image and Video
Retrieval (CIVR), Amsterdam, Netherlands, Jul 2007. [Poster].
[C22] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Walter Nunziati. Automatic detection
and recognition of players in soccer videos. In Proc. of International Conference on Visual Information
Systems (VISUAL), Shanghai, China, Jun 2007. [Oral].
— National Conferences and Tech. Reports —
[D1] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Andrea M. Serain, Giuseppe Serra, and Benito F.
Zaccone. Combining generative and discriminative models for classifying social images from 101
object categories. In Proc. of GIRPR National Conference, Certosa di Pontignano (SI), Italy, Jun 2012.
[D2] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Fabrizio Dini, Giuseppe Lisanti, Lorenzo Seidenari, and Giuseppe Serra. Recent research activities in videosurveillance at UNIFI::MICC. In Proc.
of GIRPR National Conference, Marina di Ascea (SA), Italy, Jun 2010.
[D3] Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, and Arjun Jain. Automatic detection of advertising trademarks in sport video. In Proc. of Italian Research Conference on Digital Library Systems
(IRCDL), Padova, Italy, Jan 2008.

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