Prof. Yiannis S. Boutalis received a diploma of Electrical Engineering in 1983 from Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH), Greece and a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1988 from the Computer Science Division of National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Since 1996, he has been a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of DUTH, where, after serving at the ranks of Lecturer, Assistant and Associate Professor, he is now Professor, Director of the Laboratory of Automatic Control Systems and Robotics. He also served as the Chair of the Department from 2015 to 2020. In the past, he has worked as a contract Assistant Professor (PD 407) at the University of Thessaly, Greece and as a contract professor at the School of Aeronautical Engineering (SMA) of the Hellenic Air Force Academy. He also worked as a researcher at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), Greece, and as CEO of Ideatech S.A., a company active in the development of pattern recognition and signal processing applications. He has so far developed collaborations with six universities and research institutes abroad and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Automation of the Technical University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.