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 80 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.