Gian Luca Marcialis is Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Cagliari, where he leads the Biometric Unit of the sAIfer Lab. He holds a PhD in Electronic and Computer Engineering and has obtained the national scientific qualification for full professorship. His research focuses on biometric recognition systems, with particular emphasis on fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD), deepfake detection, biometric forensics, and secure AI technologies for identity verification.

Since 2009, he has been the founder and chair of the International Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet), a globally recognized benchmark initiative in biometric anti-spoofing. LivDet attracted an increasing participation from both academia and industry, including partners such as Thales and Jenetric. LivDet's ninth edition is ongoing.

Prof. Marcialis is also the Director of the Interuniversity Research Center “BullyBuster”, which involves four Italian universities and develops AI-based technologies for detecting and preventing bullying and cyberbullying. His projects BullyBuster and BullyBuster 2 have received national recognition and were listed among the TOP100 global initiatives addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals by IRCAI-UNESCO.

Over the years, he has contributed to several European (FP7 Tabula Rasa, Let’s Crowd) and national research projects, collaborated with leading international experts such as Anil Jain, Sébastien Marcel, Christoph Busch, and Julian Fierrez, and established technology transfer agreements with major companies like Crossmatch, DEDEM, and Thales.

Prof. Marcialis has authored more than 150 scientific publications, including papers in top-tier journals such as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (he is also an AE), Pattern Recognition, and Image and Vision Computing. He has also been active as a Guest Associate Editor for IET Biometrics and Pattern Recognition Letters and serves as a referee for major journals and conferences in biometrics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence.

He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of IAPR and ACM, as well as a member of the IEEE Biometrics Council.