Prof Horst Bunke received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen, Germany. In 1984, he joined the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he is a professor in the Computer Science Department. He was Department Chairman from 1992 - 1996, Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1997 to 1998, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Science from 2001 to 2003.

From 1998 to 2000 Horst Bunke served as 1st Vice-President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). In 2000 he also was Acting President of this organization. Horst Bunke is a Fellow of the IAPR, former Editor-in-Charge of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Electronic Letters of Computer Vision and Image Analysis, Editor-in-Chief of the book series on Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence by World Scientific Publ. Co., Advisory Editor of Pattern Recognition, Associate Editor of Acta Cybernetica and Frontiers of Computer Science in China, and former Associate Editor of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, and Pattern Analysis and Applications.

Horst Bunke received an honorary doctor degree from the University of Szeged, Hungary, and held visiting positions at the IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center (1989), the University of Szeged, Hungary (1991), the University of South Florida at Tampa (1991, 1996, 1998-2007), the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (1994), Kagawa University, Takamatsu, Japan (1995), Curtin University, Perth, Australia (1999), and Australian National University, Canberra (2005).

He served as a co-chair of the 4th Int. Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition held in Ulm, Germany, 1997 and as a Track Co-Chair of the 16th and 17th Int. Conference on Pattern Recognition held in Quebec City, Canada and Cambridge, UK in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Also he was chairman of the IAPR TC2 Workshop on Syntactic and Structural Pattern Recognition held in Bern 1992, a co-chair of the 7th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems held in Nelson, NZ, 2006, a cochair of the 10th Int. Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, held in La Baule, France, 2006, and a program co-chair of the 11th Int. Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition held in Montreal, Canada, 2008. Horst Bunke was on the program and organization committee of many other conferences and served as a referee for numerous journals and scientific organizations. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Horst Bunke has more than 600 publications, including 40 authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited books and special editions of journals.