Francesco Beritelli received a PhD degree in electronics, computer science, and telecommunicationsengineering from the University of Catania, Italy, in 1997. From 1997 to 2000, he, in collaboration with CSELT (now Telecom Italia LAB), played an active part in international ITU-T standardization meetings. He is currently an Associate Professor with the University of Catania. His main research activities are in the area of robust audio and speech signal classification and recognition, variable bit-rate speech coding, and adaptive rate voice and dual-stream transmission for mobile IP telephony applications, QoS in mobile Internet access, and drone communications. His interests also include the field of cardiac biometric identification, rainfall estimation and monitoring, and post-earthquake geolocation. He has 130 scientific publications, mainly in international journals, books, and conference proceedings.