My name is Manuel Barrena. I am Associate Professor at the University of Extremadura, Spain. I received the M.Sc. degree in Mathematics (1984) from the University of Extremadura and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (1995) from the Technical University of Madrid, in Spain. I am currently the main coordinator of the Media Engineering Research Group and a founder of Sicubo, the first spin-off company from the University of Extremadura. I have been a visiting professor at the Fachhochschule Giessen-Friedberg , Germany (1989) and visiting scientist at Northeastern University (1997). My teaching activity is centered in database systems and multimedia information systems and my main research interests focus on multi-dimensional indexing and video and image research. Our group has designed Qatris iManager, a CBIR system to classify and search by content in large collections of images and Qatris vManager a system to catalog and search digital video according to taxonomies and ontologies defined by the user and using the MPEG-7 metadata standard.