Giovanni Maria Farinella

Giovanni Maria Farinella is a Full Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy. He is the Founder Member of the IPLAB Research Group at University of Catania since 2005, an Associate Member of the Computer Vision and Robotics Research Group at University of Cambridge since 2006, and an Associate Member of the Italian National Research Council since 2018. He serves as Scientific Advisor of the NVIDIA AI Technology Centre and board member of the CINI Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems.

Dr. Farinella obtained his degree in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from the University of Catania in 2004 and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Vision) from the same institution in 2008. He has obtained the National Scientific Qualification to Associate Professor in 2013-2014 and to Full Professor in 2018.

His primary research interests focus on First Person (Egocentric) Vision, Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Machine Learning. Dr. Farinella has pioneered research in egocentric video analysis, object interaction detection, activity recognition, and scene understanding from a first-person perspective. His work bridges theoretical computer vision with practical applications in industrial settings, healthcare, and cultural heritage sites. His recent publications demonstrate a clear trajectory toward more sophisticated, real-time egocentric vision systems capable of understanding complex human activities, anticipating actions, and detecting procedural mistakes through integration of visual analysis, gaze tracking, and large language models.

Dr. Farinella has published extensively in top-tier computer vision venues, with his most recent work focusing on egocentric action anticipation, mistake detection in procedural tasks, and the integration of multimodal large language models with visual understanding. His research shows strong emphasis on practical industrial applications while advancing fundamental computer vision techniques.

• PAMI Mark Everingham Prize 2017
• Intel's 2022 Outstanding Researcher Award

Dr. Farinella has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Pattern Recognition - Elsevier, and International Journal of Computer Vision. He has held leadership roles as Area Chair for CVPR 2020/21/22/23, ICCV 2017/19/21/23, ECCV 2020, and as Program Chair of ECCV 2022. He founded and directs the International Computer Vision Summer School (since 2006) and the Medical Imaging Summer School (since 2014). As PI of the EGO4D project, he helped create one of the largest egocentric video datasets with over 3,670 hours of footage from 923 participants across 74 locations worldwide. His IPLAB research group leads multiple significant projects including VALUE, ENIGMA, and FIPEVIS, with strong industry collaborations.