Study at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Professor Ling Shao is the Executive Vice President and Provost (the Chief Academic Officer) of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. He is also the Founding CEO and Chief Scientist of the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE. He received the B.Eng. degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), the M.Sc. degree in Medical Image Analysis and the Ph.D. (D.Phil.) degree in Computer Vision at the Robotics Research Group with Professor Sir Michael Brady from the University of Oxford. Previously, He was Chair Professor (2016-2018) in Computer Vision and Machine Learning and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with the University of East Anglia, Norwich, Chair Professor (2014-2016) in Computer Vision and Machine Intelligence and Head of the Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence Group with Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, a Senior Lecturer (2009-2014) with the University of Sheffield and a Senior Scientist (2005-2009) with Philips Research, The Netherlands. His research interests include Computer Vision, Deep Learning/Machine Learning, Medical Imaging, and Image/Video Processing. He has authored/co-authored over 400 papers in top conferences/journals such as ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, TPAMI and IJCV and over 20 EU/US patents.

Ling Shao has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and several other journals. He has edited four books and several special issues for journals such as IJCV. He has organized a number of international workshops with top conferences including ICCV, ECCV and ACM Multimedia. He was the General Chair for BMVC 2018, has been an Area Chair or Program Committee member for many conferences, including ICCV, CVPR, ECCV and ACM MM, and a reviewer for many leading journals. He was selected as a Highly Cited Researcher by the Web of Science in 2018 and 2019. He is a Fellow of the IAPR, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the IET, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Life Member of the ACM. 

Fahad Khan is an Associate Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He previously was a Lead Scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Before joining the IIAI, he was a Senior Lecturer at Computer Vision Laboratory, Linkoping University, Sweden. He received an MSc degree in Intelligent Systems Design from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Vision from Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. From 2012 to 2014, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Computer Vision Laboratory, Linkoping University, Sweden. From 2014 to 2018, he was a research fellow at Linkoping University, Sweden. In 2016, he received the prestigious starting grant (acceptance rate 15%) worth 350K Euros from the Swedish Research Council. In 2018, he was awarded the Docent title (in Sweden, Docent is often translated as Associate Professor) in computer vision from Linkoping University, Sweden. He has achieved top ranks on various international challenges (Visual Object Tracking VOT: 1^st 2014, 2016 and 2018 and 2^nd in 2015; VOT-TIR: 1^st 2015 and 2016; OpenCV Tracking: 1^st 2015; 1^st PASCAL VOC Segmentation and Action Recognition tasks 2010). He received the best paper award in the computer vision track at IEEE ICPR 2016. He has published over 50 reviewed conference papers, journal articles, and book contributions, with over 6000 citations according to Google Scholar. His research interests include computer vision and machine learning. He serves as a regular program committee member for leading computer vision and artificial intelligence conferences such as IEEE CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV.

Dr. Munawar Hayat is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Dr Hayat received his PhD from The University of Western Australia (UWA) and his PhD thesis received multiple awards, including the Dean’s List Honorable Mention Award and the Robert Street Prize (awarded to one student annually at UWA; since its inception in 1996, the prize went for the first time to a computer science PhD thesis). After his PhD, he joined IBM Research as a postdoc and then moved to the University of Canberra in a tenured-track faculty position as an Assistant Professor. He is currently a Senior Scientist at Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence, UAE. Munawar has secured 380K AUD of research funding through the highly competitive and prestigious Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme. He was granted two US patents, and has published over 30 papers at leading venues in his field, including TPAMI, IJCV, CVPR, ECCV and ICCV. His research interests are in computer vision, machine/deep learning, and signal processing.

Dr. Rao Muhammad Anwer is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to joining MBZUAI, he was at Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) in Abu Dhabi working as Research Scientist. Before joining IIAI, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with Aalto University, Finland from 2014-2018. He received the master’s degree in intelligent systems design from the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the Ph.D. degree in computer vision from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. His research interests are in object detection, pedestrian detection and action recognition

Hisham Cholakkal is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to MBZUAI, Hisham worked as a Research Scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) in Abu Dhabi. He received PhD degree in Computer Vision from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and M.Tech degree in Digital Signal Processing from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. He has six years of experience at various industrial and academic research labs. Before joining IIAI, he was a Senior Technical Lead in the Computer Vision and Deep learning Research team at Mercedes-Benz R&D, India. He has also worked as a computer vision researcher at BEL-Central Research Lab, India and Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Singapore. His research interests include object detection, instance segmentation, pedestrian detection, human object interaction, human pose estimation, crowd counting, image classification and weakly supervised learning.

Muhammad Haris Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to MBZUAI, he was a Research Scientist in Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), UAE. Before joining IIAI, he served as an Assistant Professor at Comsats University Islamabad (CUI), Pakistan for 2 years. Earlier, he was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham (UoN), UK for 1.5 years. He obtained his PhD in Computer Vision from University of Nottingham (UoN), UK, and Masters from University of Sussex, UK. Prior to starting his PhD, he also served as a Lecturer for 3 years at CUI, Pakistan. He has authored and co-authored several papers in top-ranked computer vision conferences. His overall peer-reviewed research has over 1500 citations. His research interests span active topics in computer vision including face-related tasks, domain adaptation, visual tracking and object recognition. He is also a recipient of International Research Excellence Scholarship for his Doctoral study.

Dr. Hang Dai is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to joining MBZUAI, Dr. Dai worked as a research scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) in Abu Dhabi. He received his PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science at The University of York, U.K., in 2018. He was an Oversea Research Scholar with the University of York from 2015 to 2018. His research was funded by NHS, Google, Royal Academy of Engineering and the Leverhulme Trust and QIDIS from the National Commissioning Group. He served as a reviewer of ICCV, CVPR, ECCV and program committee member of AAAI. His research interests include geometric deep learning, deepfake detection, 3D computer vision.

Dr Mohammad Yaqub is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He is also an honorary research fellow at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Dr Yaqub spent 12 years in Oxford, UK. He received his DPhil (PhD) in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Oxford in 2011. During his PhD, he was supervised by Prof Alison Noble, Dr Kassim Javaid and Prof Cyrus Cooper. He worked on developing machine learning solutions to real-world medical problems. After his PhD, he was a research fellow (2011 - 2016) at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford and a lecturer (2010 - 2020) in the IT Services, University of Oxford.

He worked on several problems including fetal brain structure detection and segmentation in 2D and 3D ultrasound, fusion of 4D echocardiographic images, automatic categorization and quality checking of images from routine fetal anomaly scans. He has co-supervised PhD and master students during his work at Oxford.

Dr Yaqub was also the Vice President of Engineering (2016 - 2020) at Intelligent Ultrasound limited where he led a team to build AI-based medical device products. Dr Yaqub has taken his research ideas from its early days at the University of Oxford all the way to the integration of a medical product (ScanNav) into the ultrasound machines of a world-leading manufacturer.

Dr Yaqub’s research interests include medical image analysis (e.g, ultrasound, MRI and CT), deep learning, machine learning, and medical image registration. He has published over 35 peer-reviewed articles in top conferences and journals such as IEEE TMI, Medical Image Analysis, MICCAI and Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology. He has been granted multiple research grants and two patents. He is co-organizing the 24^th Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MUIA) in summer 2020 at Oxford University.

Dr. Salman Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He is highly accomplished within his field, with research interests including computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning.

He has been a Senior Scientist with the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence since 2018, and an Honorary Lecturer with Australian National University since 2016. Previous roles include working as a Research Scientist with Data61-CSIRO (previously NICTA) from 2016-2018, and Visiting Researcher with National ICT Australia, CRL, in 2015.

In 2019, Dr. Khan was awarded the outstanding reviewer award at IEEE CVPR, won the best paper award at 9th ICPRAM 2020, and won second prize in the NTIRE Image Enhancement Competition alongside CVPR 2019.

Throughout his career he has acted as an investigator on several competitive research grants funded by agencies such as the Khalifa University Research Award in the UAE, Boeing in the US, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency in Australia. Dr. Khan has also acted as a referee for international grant agencies such as the Australian and European Research Council (ARC and ERC), and IEEE Chair for Computer Society.

He has published over 80 papers in top scientific journals and conferences such as TPAMI, IJCV, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS and AAAI.

Dr. Khan was a recipient of several prestigious scholarships, including Fulbright and IPRS, and served as a program committee member for several premier conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, AAAI and IJCAI.

Dr. Khan received his PhD degree from The University of Western Australia in 2016. His thesis received an honorable mention on the Dean’s List Award, and was nominated for the prestigious ‘Robert Street Prize’ at UWA as well as the ‘John Makepeace Bennett Award’ from CORE, Australia.

Huan Xiong is an Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning department at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to joining MBZUAI, he was a Research Scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, China, in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Mathematics, University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2016. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research, University of Strasbourg, France, from 2016 to 2018. He hosted two research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) respectively. His research interests include machine learning and discrete mathematics.

Bin Gu is an Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to joining MBZUAI, he was a full professor of Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. He received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in 2005 and 2011, respectively. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the University of Western Ontario from 2013 to 2015, with the University of Texas at Arlington from 2016 to 2017, and the University of Pittsburgh from 2017 to 2018. His research interests focus on large scaling optimization in machine learning and data mining. He has published 40 more papers, with over 2,000 citations according to Google Scholar.  He served as a program committee member or reviewer for several leading machine learning and data mining conferences and journals such as NIPS, ICML, KDD, AAAI, TPAMI, JMLR, and a senior program committee member of IJCAI 2019 and 2020.

Karthik Nandakumar is an Associate Professor in the Computer Vision department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Prior to joining MBZUAI, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research – Singapore from 2014 to 2020 and a Scientist at Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore from 2008 to 2014. He received his B.E. degree (2002) from Anna University, Chennai, India, M.S. degrees in Computer Science (2005) and Statistics (2007), and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (2008) from Michigan State University, and M.Sc. degree in Management of Technology (2012) from National University of Singapore. His primary research interests include computer vision, machine learning, biometric recognition, applied cryptography, and blockchain. Specifically, he is interested in research on deep learning algorithms for biometrics and video surveillance applications as well as various security, privacy, and trust-related issues in machine learning. He has co-authored two books titled Introduction to Biometrics (Springer, 2011) and Handbook of Multibiometrics (Springer, 2006).

Karthik Nandakumar has received a number of awards including the 2008 Fitch H. Beach Outstanding Graduate Research Award from the College of Engineering at Michigan State University, the Best Paper award from the Pattern Recognition journal (2005), the Best Scientific Paper Award (Biometrics Track) at ICPR 2008, and the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award. He is a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS). He was also an Associate Editor of T-IFS from 2015 to 2019 and received the 2019 Outstanding Editorial Board Member award. He is also an Associate Editor for Elsevier journal on Pattern Recognition and a Distinguished Industry Speaker for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. In the recent past, he has served as Vice President for Education in the IEEE Biometrics Council and as an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committee on Information Forensics and Security. He is a senior member of the IEEE.