"Vlad Atanasiu holds a PhD in Arabic paleography from the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, and studied cognitive sciences as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wrote a book on statistical aspects of calligraphy. As coordinator of the European project ""Bernstein"" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences he developed image processing and geographical information software for the analysis and history of paper. For ParisTech Telecom, Paris, he did research on writer identification. Presently he is teaching information visualization and studying for his second PhD, in the computer science field of document engineering, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland."