Lambert Schomaker (19-2-1957) received his M.Sc. degree in psychophysiological psychology in 1983 (cum laude), and his Ph.D. degree on "Simulation and Recognition of Handwriting Movements" in 1991 at Nijmegen University, The Netherlands. Since 1988, he has been working in several European Esprit projects concerning the recognition of on-line, connected cursive script on the basis of knowledge on the handwriting movement process. He was the project coordinator of a large European project on multimodality in multimedial interfaces (project MIAMI), and has enjoyed collaborative research projects with several industrial companies. Current projects are in the area of image-based retrieval, on-line and off-line handwriting recognition, forensic writer identification, and cognitive robot navigation models. Apart from research, his duties involve teaching courses in artificial intelligence and pattern classification. prof. Schomaker has been involved in the organization of several conferences on handwriting recognition and modeling. He has organized the Seventh International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition in the year 2000 in Amsterdam. He has been the chairman of TC-11/Reading Systems of the Int. Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), chairman of the Int. Unipen Foundation for benchmarking of on-line handwriting recognizers, member of the IAPR TC5 committee on Benchmarking and Software. He is member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IAPR and the BNVKI. Within the Netherlands he has been member of Advisory Board of the NICI institute Nijmegen, is member of the Advisory Boards of the J.F. Schouten School for User-System Interaction, Eindhoven, and the USI postgraduate school of the TU/e. He is member of the ToKeN2000 programme committee of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). He has contributed to over 140 peer-reviewed publications in journals and books. Per 1/1/2001 he has accepted the position of full professor in AI at Groningen University, The Netherlands, as director Research & Education. As the ALICE department (Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Engineering) grew from 5fte in 2001 to 35fte in 2009, he is now the scientific director of this research institute at the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. The work of prof. Schomaker is cited in 13 US and 10 international patents. He was involved in several valorisation projects, with as notable examples a series of EU Esprit projects with Olivetti computers and the Active Book Company as well as dedicated grants from industry (Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft). His work on neural networks for handwriting and gesture recognition is a precursor to modern handwriting and gesture-recognition methods on tablet computers such as the iPad. He is currently active in a 30 MEuro multidisciplinary valorisation project ('Target') in mass-storage, high-performance computing and datamining, in order to implement the Monk generic search engine for handwritten historical archives. The Monk system is unique, world wide, due to its huge scale, genericity and its use of live ('24/7') machine learning. In 2012, the Monk system contained 130 million image of handwritten words, from over twenty historical collections, and 22 thousand trained word classes, continuously refined by new dedicated recognition and retrieval schemes using dedicated shape features for handwriting and user labeling. The availability of thousands of example images for single classes of complex patterns has brought pattern recognition and machine learning into a new ballpark.