Dr. Giannis Chantas
(ex PhD student of
Nikolas Galatsanos)
2nd
IEEE Greek Signal Processing Jam
Thessaloniki,
Thursday 17 May 2012
Dear Galatsanos
family members;
Dear colleagues,
and the rest of you being here today:
I am very grateful for meeting the chance
to commemorate the scientific figure of Professor Nikolaos
Galatsanos. He battled against cancer for two years,
and peacefully passed away on the fourth of September 2010 leaving us with
great memories and strong feelings. His loss was great for all of us:
principally the loss was most intensely felt by his family members and indeed
for the Greek subset of the scientific community. Our feelings for him and the
grief are essentially a natural consequence of the occasion that such a
valuable person passed away. Our sincere feelings of sorrow are strong evidence
that Professor N. Galatsanos is worth to be mourned
and be commemorated. I feel deeply honored that I am given the chance to
initiate the tribute to the memory of Nikolaos Galatsanos, and I would like to express to you my gratitude
for this.
I will start by talking a little
bit about Nikolaos Galatsanos
academic record. He was very active in research areas comprising Statistical
Image Modeling and Recovery, and precisely Image Restoration; Image Blind Deconvolution; Super-resolution; Image Segmentation, and
Image Watermarking. He was a true advocate of the Bayesian statistical stream,
being occupied in Bayesian Inference and variational
Bayesian Approximation methodology. He also pursued research on realistic “edge
preserving” image models based on the Student’s-t distribution something that
brought success through guiding to interesting scientific results.
After a short period of serving as
an Assistant Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he was elected
Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, University
of Ioannina, Greece, where he was a member of the
Information Processing and Analysis research group, comprised by a close neat
family of keen researchers working merely in artificial intelligence, image
processing, optimization, signal processing among others. He offered to the
Department in many ways. He always pursued scientific excellence and a deep
understanding of fundamentals, which rendered him a very successful researcher.
He was committed to teaching. He was a valuable mentor for the students and an
inspiration to them. Another of his offers was his efforts to initiate the
transition of the department from computer science to computer engineering.
In June 1981, he obtained the
Diploma degree of electrical engineering from the National Technical University
of Athens. After a short period, he entered graduate school obtaining an MSEEE
and a PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University
of Wisconsin Madison in 1984 and 1989, respectively. Following his PhD in the
USA, he obtained the following academic positions:
• Professor 2/08-Present: Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Patras,
Rio, Greece.
• Professor 4/02-2/08: Department of
Computer Science, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece.
• Visiting
Research Scientist 1/99-7/99: Department of Informatics, University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
• Visiting
Research Scientist 8/98-12/98: Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.
• Visiting
Research Scientist 5/98-8/98: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern
University, Evanston, IL, USA.
• Associate Professor 8/95-3/02: Electrical
and Computer Engineering, Illinois Inst. of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA.
• Assistant Professor 8/89-8/95: Electrical
and Computer Engineering, Illinois Inst. of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA.
• Research
Assistant 9/85-6/89: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univ. of Wisconsin
Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
• Teaching
Assistant 9/83-6/89: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univ. of Wisconsin
Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
Professor Galatsanos
was highly reputable to the international and Greek scientific community. His
colleagues in Greece, University of Ioannina and Patras, held a great admiration and respect to his entity.
Many of his colleagues were close friends. He was also known around the world,
since he had an excellent track record in scientific publications. The impact
of his work was indeed very important, which made him creditable to the
international signal and image processing community.
In what follows, I will try to
remember and convey to you the type of person Nikolaos
Galatsanos was, based on my experience that I was
fortunate to have during the period when Nikolaos Galatsanos was my advisor and mentor. If I was asked to
describe Nikolaos Galatsanos
in just a few words that would clearly be “a talented man, an educator and
researcher with an increased sense of duty”. It is not an exaggeration that he
was a highly motivated person whose motive was just to offer and be recognized
for his work. Commemorating him today is the least we can do in order to
recognize his work and acts, and I feel that he would be proud for that.
He was with the Department of
Computer Science of University of Ioannina for almost
six years. There he formed a circle of colleagues and friends. Nicholas always
cared for the proper functioning of the Department. He was not an elitist for
which he earned the respect of everyone in the Department. He tried to uphold
the rules of the Department without fearing to become unpopular. In the
contrary, not only did he become popular, but the faculty and students
respected him and admired him. He was fair in all aspects: when grading papers,
when reviewing other’s research work, when he was present in a defense, when he
judged a person’s scientific capabilities. Moreover, he had managed to combine
his high sense of justice with his good-natured character.
Nikolaos Galatsanos
was highly regarded for his dignity. He was the type of man who could easily be
trusted and one could rely on him. Thus, it is of no surprise that he had many
keen friends. He was hard working and with a clear code of conduct. Moreover,
he inspired others to follow a similar demeanor. He also tried to imbue his
working ethics to his students. In this way, he inspired students to try for
the best they can achieve.
As a scientist, he was highly
gifted and passionate. Some of his colleagues spoke of him as a true luminary.
On the occasions where he dealt with a problem, he focused all his mental capacity
and effort to solve it. He was open-minded. He never despised other scientific
fields and never felt that his knowledge was superior to others. On the
contrary, he always tried to learn new things and create connections with new
knowledge. This line of reasoning was beneficial for his research since it lead
to very interesting scientific results by cross-fertilizing methods from
machine learning to image processing.
As a man, he held an optimistic view
on life. He was almost always in a good mood. Even as a scientist, he never
thought of life as being locked up in the scientist’s cell miserably trying to
produce new findings. Instead of this line of reasoning, he pursued a diverse
array of activities, besides his duties as a Professor, such as mountain
hiking, martial arts (specifically, Japanese Karate at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison) and a profound interest in social life. His spirit was that
of a pure young person, however without compromising wisdom. On the contrary,
he had managed to combine the wisdom of a mature person with his enthusiasm and
impulse for life. He was a fighter and never feared to deal with the
pathological problems residing in the Greek higher education system. He always
spoke of his thoughts without considering the consequences. This made him a
strong personality that impressed whoever met him.
For me, Professor Galatsanos will always be an inspiration, and I believe for
many other people not necessarily being closely connected to him. He really
cared for his students and there was a feeling of good fortune by anyone being
his student. We regarded him as a fatherly figure and he really acted like
this. He was always willing to offer advice and rewarding or corrective comments.
He was always there for help, and he had the talent to offer it properly.
Sometimes he was strict but he was always fair. He never reprimanded without
justification. His courage and strength to continue research during his fight
with cancer was remarkable. He was present at his students’ thesis defense
despite his condition. Moreover, he danced at my wedding in September 2009.
At this point, before ending my
words, let me express my view on existence and how this view of mine was shaped
during the years I was next to Nikolaos Galatsanos. When a pebble hits the inert surface of a lake,
the waving caused by the disturbance propagates on the lake surface, across all
possible directions. This expansion does not end at the lake shore: it causes
changes to the environment in a way often not seen by us, either because the
changes are in the future or far from us. In a similar manner, a person’s life
and death produces a waving that will always act in the universe even in ways
we do not perceive or even conceive. I feel confident that the waving of the
life of Nicholas is very strong and is expanding in colorful ways. And I feel
very fortunate to have been influenced by that waving. During my apprenticeship
with Professor Galatsanos, I learned how to be a pebble
that hits the surface of a lake, and for that I want to express my deep
feelings of gratitude to him.
Thank you!