Professor Elhoseiny elected as a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

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By David Murphy

KAUST Assistant Professor of Computer Science Mohamed H. Elhoseiny has been elected as a senior member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Elhoseiny was recognized for his longstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and long-term membership in the AAAI.

Founded in 1979, AAAI is a nonprofit scientific society dedicated to promoting the research and responsible use of AI technology. According to its website, the AAAI aims to advance the scientific understanding of the “mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.”

Elhoseiny was inducted as a senior member during the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence’s (AAAI-23’s) awards ceremony on Saturday, February 11, 2023. AAAI-23 was held from February 7-14 in Washington, D.C., under the theme "creating collaborative bridges within and beyond AI."

“It was a great feeling to receive my membership certificate from the current AAAI president, Francesca Rossi, as part of the award ceremony in front of all the (thousands of) conference attendees,” he noted of his award.

“Being recognized by the international AI research community is a great honor. I also feel proud of my students who have worked hard and consider them part of this recognition.”  

Before joining KAUST in 2019, Elhoseiny received his Ph.D. degree ('16) from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Canada. He then spent over two years working as a postdoctoral researcher in Facebook’s AI research wing. The PI of the KAUST Computer Vision, Content AI (Vision-CAIR) Research Group received his B.Sc. in Computer Systems and M.Sc. in Computer Systems from Ain Shams University, Egypt, in 2010 and 2006, respectively.

Elhoseiny’s primary research interests are in computer vision—the intersection between natural language and vision and computational creativity—in particular, efficient multimodal learning with limited data and vision and language. He is also interested in affective AI, especially understanding and generating novel visual content, such as art and fashion.

In 2018, he received the best paper award for his work on creative fashion generation at the ECCV 2018 Workshop on Fashion and Art. Elhoseiny also received the Doctoral Consortium Award at CVPR 2016 and an NSF Fellowship for his Write-a-Classifier Project in 2014. His earlier research regarding creative art generation was featured in the New Scientist Magazine and MIT Technology Review; the MIT Technology Review has also covered his work on lifelong learning.

Elhoseiny believes KAUST has the potential to play a leading role in AI research not only in the MENA region but also on a global scale: “KAUST has made significant investments in AI research, both in terms of infrastructure and human resources, and has attracted some of the world's most talented researchers and scholars in AI.

“Furthermore, its partnerships with industry and other academic institutions have provided opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing. These efforts have helped position KAUST as a hub for AI research in the region and beyond.”