Educational Background:

Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2010)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

  • Ph.D. thesis: Dynamic Textures: Models and Applications

  • Ph.D. advisory committee: Prof. Narendra Ahuja, Prof. Thomas Huang, Prof. David Forysth, Prof. Yi Ma, and Prof. John C. Hart

  • GPA: 4.0; Graduated with High Distinction


Master of Science (M.S.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2008)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • M.S. thesis: Phase-Based Modeling of Dynamic Textures

  • GPA: 4.0; Graduated with High Distinction


Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer and Communications Engineering (2005)

American University of Beirut

  • Final Year Project: Real-Time Vision-Based Mobile Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments

  • GPA: 4.0; Graduated with High Distinction

Awards and Honors:

  • Awarded the Shoman Arab Researcher Award for the topic of Machine Learning and Big Data (2020)

  • Winner of 3D Instance Segmentation task in ScanNet Benchmark Challenge at CVPR (2019)

  • Best paper awards at the following workshops:

    1. CVPR Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (2013)

    2. ECCV Workshop on Computer Vision for UAVs (2018)

    3. CVPR International Workshop on Computer Vision for UAVs (2019)

    4. ECCV Workshop on Adversarial Robustness in the Real World (2020)

    5. CVPR Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (2021)

  • Best business plan award in the Vision Industry Entrepreneur Workshop (VIEW 2016) at CVPR (2016)

  • Google Faculty Research Award based on a project entitled "ActivityNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Human Activity Understanding"; 1st and only award in MENA for Machine Perception (2015)

  • SABIC Postdoctoral Award (2014-2015)

  • Research Collaboration Award from the University of Western Australia (2014)

  • KAUST Seed Fund Award (2013-2015)

  • Ranked first in the IEN (Illinois Entrepreneur Network) business plan competition (2009)

  • Recipient of the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Fellowship at UIUC (2007-2009)

  • Recipient of the James M. Henderson Fellowship at UIUC (2006-2007)

  • Ranked first among all sections of the Lebanese Baccalaureate (National Examinations) and the Presidential Award for Academic Excellence from the Lebanese Ministry of Education (2000-2001)

Professional Service:

  • Area Chair (AC) for CVPR 2018/2021/2022, ICCV 2019/2021, ICLR 2021, and AAAI 2021

  • Associate Editor (AE) for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) journal (2020-present)

  • Associate Editor (AE) for Image and Vision Computing (IVC) journal (2018-2021)

  • Co-organizer of ICCV Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding (2021)

  • Guest organizer of ICCV Workshop on Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing [EPIC] (2021)

  • Invited contributor to the AI Index Report for the state of large-scale video understanding (2019-2020)

  • Co-organizer of CVPR workshop entitled The End-of-End-to-End: A Video Understanding Pentathlon (2020)

  • Member of the Digital Revolution Task Force of the S20 as part of the G20 hosted by Saudi Arabia (2020)

  • Organizer of the annual ActivityNet Large-Scale Human Activity Recognition Challenge, which is hosted as a workshop at CVPR. Challenge sponsors over the years include industry labs such as Google, DeepMind, Facebook, Panasonic, Nvidia, Adobe, and Qualcomm (2016-present)

  • Tutorial Co-Chair for the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV); Taipei Taiwan (2016)

  • Co-Organizer of the ICCV workshop on Sparse and Low-Rank Representations in Computer Vision; Sydney Australia (2013)

  • Panel Chair of the 1st annual Interactive Digital Media Symposium; Singapore (2011)