Mauro Barni graduated in electronic engineering at the University of Florence in 1991. He received the PhD in Informatics and Telecommunications in October 1995. He has carried out his research activity for more than 20 years, first at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication of the University of Florence, then at the Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics of the University of Siena where he works as full Professor. His activity focuses on digital image processing and information security, with particular reference to the application of image processing techniques to copyright protection (digital watermarking) and authentication of multimedia (multimedia forensics). He has been studying the possibility of processing signals that has been previously encrypted without decrypting them (signal processing in the encrypted domain – s.p.e.d.). Lately he has been working on theoretical and practical aspects of adversarial signal processing, adversarial machine learning and protection of IPR in AI by means of neural network watermarking.

He is author/co-author of about 350 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings, he holds four patents in the field of digital watermarking and one patent dealing with anticounterfeiting technology. His papers on digital watermarking have significantly contributed to the development of such a theory in the last decade as it is demonstrated by the large number of citations some of these papers have received. The overall citation record of M. Barni amounts to an h-number of 66 according to Scholar Google search engine. He is co-author of the book “Watermarking Systems Engineering: Enabling Digital Assets Security and other Applications”, published by Dekker Inc. in February 2004. He is editor of the book “Document and Image Compression” published by CRC-Press in 2006.

He has been the chairman of the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop held in Siena in 2004, and the chairman of the IV edition of the International Workshop on Digital Watermarking. He was the technical program co-chair of ICASSP 2014 and the technical program chairman of the 2005 edition of the Information Hiding Workshop, the VIII edition of the International Workshop on Digital Watermarking and the V edition of the IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS 2013). In 2008, he was the recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine best column award. In 2010 he was awarded the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing best paper award. He was the recipient of the Individual Technical Achievement Award of EURASIP EURASIP for 2016.

He was the Editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security from 2015 to 2017. He was the founding editor in chief of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security. He has been a member of the editorial board of several journals including, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Circuits and system for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Open Journal on Signal Processing.

From 2010 to 2011, Prof. Barni has been the chairman of the IEEE Information Forensic and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has been a member of the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing technical committee and of the conference board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Mauro Barni is a fellow member of the IEEE, fellow member of AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association) and senior member of EURASIP. He was appointed distinguished lecturer by the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the years 2013-2014. He has been the chairman of the Italian chapter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society from 2018 to 2021.

He participated to several national and international research projects on diverse topics, including digital watermarking, information security, signal processing in the encrypted domain and multimedia forensics. He is leading the VIPP (Visual Information Processing and Protection) group of the Telecommunication Laboratory of the Information Engineering Department at the University of Siena (http://clem.dii.unisi.it/~vipp/). The group consists of 10 members including faculty members, post-doc researchers, graduate and undergraduate students.