Antonio Picariello passed away on June 23, 2020, while the SEBD 2020 conference was taking place: a real shock for all conference participants, many of them being close friends or collaborators of Antonio.
Antonio was well-known worldwide for his contributions in the area of Database and Multimedia Systems, and, more recently, of Big Data Analytics. His research activity started in the 1990s, initially focusing on Image Processing and then on Multimedia Databases. Since then, he collected many successful achievements, among which a fuzzy theory to manage complexity and uncertainty of multimedia data, a system for extracting and creating multimedia stories from heterogeneous data sources, indexing techniques for video and image databases, multimedia ontologies, an intelligent framework for detecting events in video surveillance and cybersecurity applications, and, more recently, a new model for multimedia social networks. Antonio is also credited as one of the rst researchers to have introduced the concept of multimedia recommender system.
Antonio authored more than 250 papers, published in international journals and conferences. He has been General Chair and/or Program Committee member of several international Conferences and Workshops, associate editor, member of editorial boards and guest editor of numerous international journals, as well as Principal Investigator of many research projects, some of them in collaboration with the University of Maryland at College Park, USA. He was the promoter and organizer of the MIS (Multimedia Information System) workshop, around which one of the rst international communities of friends of Multimedia was born.
In 2007 \Picus" joined the SEBD community, and since then he was one of the most active contributors. He organized the 2014 edition, which took place in Sorrento Coast and all of us remember it as a very successful and exciting event.
Besides being a man of great intelligence with extraordinary research skills, he was always humble and capable of transferring in a natural way his passion for the subjects he taught and studied to his students and colleagues. He was a good person like few others, of great humanity, always ready to support and help others in times of di culty, and not only in the academic world, but also in everyday life (through the many charity works that have characterized his life). But above all, he was a person with a contagious smile that each of us would have liked to meet in her/his own life.
All the SEBD community misses you, Picus!