Ari Visa (IEEE SM1996, M1979) received the M.S. degree in computer science and technology from the Linköping University of Technology, Linköping, Sweden, in 1981, and the Doctor of Technology degree in information science from Helsinki University of Technology (Aalto), Espoo, Finland, in 1990. He is also a Docent in image analysis at Aalto University. Dr. Visa is  currently a Professor in Digital Signal Processing and the Head of the Department of Signal Processing at Tampere University of Technology.

From 1981 to 1983, he was with the Linköping University of Technology as a Research and Teaching Assistant in the Computer Vision Laboratory. He was involved in several image processing projects. From 1984 to 1985, he was employed by the Finnish Research Centre, as a researcher  in the field of image analysis in paper quality control. From 1985 to 1988, he was a senior member in technical staff in industrial applications of  image analysis at Jaakko Pöyry Corporation. From 1988 to 1993, he was a senior researcher and a project manager in the field of image analysis with neural networks at the Finnish Research Centre. In 1993, he joined the laboratory  of Computer and Information Science.  From 1996 to 2000 he was professor in Computer Science at Lappeenranta University of Technology. Currently, Dr. Visa is a professor in Signal Processing at Tampere University of Technology. He is co-author to more than 200 refeered international papers. He holds several papents. He is active in many conference program committees and evaluates research papers and proposals. Dr. Visas current research interests are in  multimedia and multimedia systems, adaptive systems, wireless communications, distributed computing, soft computing, computer vision, knowledge mining, and knowledge retrieval.

Dr. Visa is the former President and Vice President of the Pattern Recognition  Society of Finland and the former chairman of  IAPRWorkgroup TC3 Machine Learning.