Lambert Schomaker (19-2-1957) received his MSc degree in 1983 (cum laude), and his PhD degree in 1991 at Nijmegen University. Since 1988, he has been working in several European projects concerning the recognition of cursive script and multimedia interfaces with several industrial companies. Current projects are in data mining, image-based retrieval, handwriting recognition, writer identification. He has organized conferences on handwriting recognition, AI and modeling. He has been the chairman of IAP/TC-11 Reading Systems and chairs the Unipen Foundation. He is senior member of the IEEE Computer Society and the IAPR. He has acted in the Advisory Board of several institutes. He is member of programme committees of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Academy of Sciences. He has contributed to over 100 publications. In 1/1/2001 he became full professor and director of the AI institute at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.