Short Bio
Hugo Jair Escalante is researcher scientist at Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica, INAOE, Mexico. Previously, he was assistant professor at the Graduate Program on Systems Engineering at UANL. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, for which he received the best PhD thesis on Artificial Intelligence 2010 award (Mexican Society in Artificial Intelligence). He was granted the best paper award of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks 2010 (IJCNN2010). He is secretary and member of the board of directors of ChaLearn, The Challenges in Machine Learning Organization, a non-profit organism dedicated to organizing challenges, since 2011. Also, he is member of the board of the CONACYT Network on Applied Computational Intelligence, regular member of AMEXCOMP and member of the National System of Researchers (SNI). Since 2017, he is editor of the Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning, a new book series focused on academic competitions within machine learning and related fields. He has been involved in the organization of several challenges in computer vision and machine learning, collocated with top venues in machine learning and computer vision, see http://chalearnlap.cvc.uab.es/. He has served as co-editor of special issues in IJCV, IEEE TPAMI, and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He has served as area chair for NIPS 2016 and NIPS 2017, and has been member of the program committee of venues like CVPR, ICPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NIPS, IJCNN. His research interests are on machine learning, evolutionary computing and its applications on language and vision.