Nicolai Petkov

Nicolai Petkov (born 1956) is professor of Intelligent Systems and computer science at the University of Groningen, known for his contributions in the field of brain-inspired computing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and parallel computing.

Life and work

Petkov received his PhD degree in Germany. After graduation he worked at several universities, before in 1991 he was appointed Professor of Computer Science (chair of Intelligent Systems and Parallel Computing) at the University of Groningen. He was PhD thesis director (promotor) of (with year of promotion) Michael Wilkinson (1995), Henk Bekker (1996), Marc Lankhorst (1996), Frank Schnorrenberg (1998), Thomas A. Lippert (1998), Peter Kruizinga (1999), Michel Westenberg (2001), Simona E. Grigorescu (2003), Cosmin Grigorescu (2004), Anarta Ghosh (2007), Gisela Klette (2007), Lidia Sanchez Gonzalez (2007), Erik Urbach (2008), Easwar Subramanian (2008), Giuseppe Papari (2009), Georgeos Ouzounis (2009), Petra Schneider (2010), Arie Witoelar (2010), Florence Tushabe (2010), Panchalee Sukjit (2011), Kerstin Bunte (2011), George Azzopardi (2013), Ioannis E. Giotis (2013), Fred N. Kiwanuka (2013).^[1] At the University of Groningen he was scientific director of the Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (now Johann Bernoulli Institute) from 1998 to 2009, and he is member of the University Council since 2011.^[2]

Petkov is associate editor of several scientific journals. He organised the 10th International Conference of Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns CAIP in Groningen in 2003, the 13th conference in this series in 2009 with Xiaoyi Jiang in Münster, Germany, the 16th CAIP with George Azzopardi in Valletta, Malta, and the Workshop Braincomp 2013 on Brain-Inspired Computing with Thomas Lippert and Lucio Grandinetti in Cetraro, Italy.

Petkov's initial research in the late 1980s was in the field of systolic parallel algorithms. His current research interests are in the field of computer simulations of brain functions and development of brain-inspired pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms that he applies to various types of data: image, video, audio, text, sensor, financial, web, and heterogeneous.^[3] He develops methods for the generation of intelligent programs that are automatically configured using training examples of events and patterns of interest and that are then able to detect similar patterns and events in big data. He participates in the Human Brain Project where he was named leader of the task 'Brain-inspired pattern recognition and probabilistic inference'.

Selected Publications

Petkov has authored and co-authored many publications.^[4]

Books:

• Nicolai. Petkov. Systolische Algorithmen und Arrays. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989.
• Nicolai. Petkov. Systolic Parallel Processing. Amsterdam: North-Holland, Elsevier Sci. Publ., 1993
• Nicolai. Petkov, and Michel A. Westenberg (Eds.). Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns: 10th International Conference, CAIP 2003, Groningen, The Netherlands, August 25–27, 2003, Proceedings. LNCS 2756, Springer.
• Xiaoyi Jiang, Nicolai Petkov (Eds.). Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns: 13th International Conference, CAIP 2009, Münster, Germany, September 2–4, 2009, Proceedings. LNCS 5702, Springer.
• Lucio Grandinetti, Thomas A. Lippert and Nicolai Petkov (Eds.). "Brain-Inspired Computing (International Workshop, BrainComp 2013, Cetraro, Italy, July 8-11, 2013, Revised Selected Papers)", LNCS 8603, Springer.

Articles, a selection:

• N. Petkov and P. Kruizinga: Computational models of visual neurons specialised in the detection of periodic and aperiodic oriented visual stimuli: bar and grating cells, Biological Cybernetics, 76 (2), 1997, 83-96.
• S.E. Grigorescu, N. Petkov, and P. Kruizinga. "Comparison of texture features based on Gabor filters." Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on 11.10 (2002): 1160-1167.
• C. Grigorescu, N. Petkov, and M. A. Westenberg. "Contour detection based on nonclassical receptive field inhibition." Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on 12.7 (2003): 729-739.
• G. Papari and N. Petkov. "Edge and line oriented contour detection: State of the art." Image and Vision Computing, 29 (2-3), Feb. 2011, 79-103.
• G. Azzopardi, N. Petkov: Trainable COSFIRE filters for keypoint detection and pattern recognition. "IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence", 35 (2), pp. 490–503, 2013.

References

External links

• Nicolai Petkov homepage at rug.nl