Hisham Cholakkal

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Cholakkal worked as a research scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) in Abu Dhabi. Professor Cholakkal has diverse experiences across fundamental research, teaching, and product development at industry. He has several years of experience in leading research teams involved in commercial and fundamental research. Before joining IIAI, he was a senior technical lead in the Computer Vision and Deep Learning Research team at Mercedes-Benz R and D, India. Professor Cholakkal has also worked as a researcher at BEL-Central Research Lab, India and Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Singapore.

In addition to authoring top-tier research articles and patents, he developed several computer vision frameworks that are successfully released as commercial products in various industries. Professor Cholakkal has served as a program committee member for several top conferences including CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR and ECCV.

• Ph.D. in computer science (Computer Vision) from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
• Master’s degree (M.Tech) in signal processing from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India.

• Workshop organizer at ACCV 2022
• Program committee member for top-tier conferences like CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICCV, and ECCV
• Reviewer for top journals like IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on image processing, etc
• Received ABCD (above and beyond call of duty) Award - 2017 at Mercedes-Benz R&D.
• Rated as 'excellent performer' at Mercedes-Benz R and D, 2018
• NTU Research Scholarship (2012-2016)
• GATE Scholarship (2007-2009)

Cholakkal has published papers in top scientific journals and conferences such as TPAMI, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and AAAI.

• H. Cholakkal, G. Sun, S. Khan, FS. Khan, L. Shao, L.V Gool, “Towards Partial. Supervision for Generic Object Counting in Natural Scenes”, in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2022.
• J. Cao, RM. Anwer, H. Cholakkal, FS. Khan, Y Pang, and L. Shao, “SipMask: Spatial Information Preservation for Fast Image and Video Instance Segmentation”, in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
• J. Cao, Y. Pang, RM. Anwer, H. Cholakkal, J. Xie, M. Shah, FS. Khan, “PSTR: End-to-End One-Step Person Search With Transformers,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022.
• J. Xie, H. Cholakkal, RM. Anwer, FS. Khan, Y Pang, L. Shao, and M. Shah, “Count-and Similarity-aware R-CNN for Pedestrian Detection”, in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
• S Narayan, H Cholakkal, M Hayat, FS Khan, MH Yang, L Shao, “D2-Net: Weakly-Supervised Action Localization via Discriminative Embeddings and Denoised Activations”, in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.
• AK Bhunia, S Khan, H Cholakkal, RM Anwer, FS Khan, M Shah, “Handwriting Transformers”, in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.