Joe Minichino is a computer vision engineer for Hoolux Medical by day and a developer of the NoSQL database LokiJS by night. On weekends, he is a heavy metal singer/songwriter. He is a passionate programmer who is immensely curious about programming languages and technologies and constantly experiments with them. At Hoolux, Joe leads the development of an Android computer vision-based advertising platform for the medical industry.

Born and raised in Varese, Lombardy, Italy, and coming from a humanistic background in philosophy (at Milan's Università Statale), Joe has spent his last 11 years living in Cork, Ireland, which is where he became a computer science graduate at the Cork Institute of Technology.

Joseph Howse lives in Canada. During the winters, he grows his beard, while his four cats grow their thick coats of fur. He loves combing his cats every day and sometimes, his cats also pull his beard.

He has been writing for Packt Publishing since 2012. His books include OpenCV for Secret Agents, OpenCV Blueprints, Android Application Programming with OpenCV 3, OpenCV Computer Vision with Python, and Python Game Programming by Example.

When he is not writing books or grooming his cats, he provides consulting, training, and software development services through his company, Nummist Media (http://nummist.com).