Bernard Ghanem

March 2026

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  Five IVUL Papers Accepted to CVPR 2026

  1 min read · Sun, Mar 1 2026

  News

  CVPR

  IVUL has five papers accepted to CVPR 2026, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, June 3–7, 2026. The accepted papers are: β-CLIP: Text-Conditioned Contrastive Learning for Multi-Granular Vision-Language Alignment Authors: Fatimah Zohra, Chen Zhao, Hani Itani, Bernard Ghanem Affiliations: KAUST CURE: Curriculum-Guided Multi-Task Training for Reliable Anatomy-Grounded Report Generation Authors: Pablo Messina, Andrés Villa, Juan León Alcázar, Karen Sánchez, Carlos Hinojosa, Denis Parra, Álvaro Soto, Bernard Ghanem Affiliations: KAUST; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile EasyV2V: A High

February 2026

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  ‘Rising Stars’ in AI research explore reasoning, trust, and real-world impact‘Rising Stars’ in AI research explore reasoning, trust, and real-world impact

  1 min read · Mon, Feb 23 2026

  News Clip News Press Releases

  As artificial intelligence grows more capable and more closely scrutinized, questions of reasoning, reliability, and impact are taking center stage. At its fifth Rising Stars in AI Symposium, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) convened 25 exceptional early-career researchers selected from more than 430 applicants to explore how the next generation of AI will be built and how it can be trusted. For Dr. Sahar Abdelnabi, a principal investigator at ELLIS Institute Tübingen, whose research examines how AI models alter their behavior when they know they are being evaluated
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  KAUST becomes first FIFA research institute in the Middle East and Asia

  1 min read · Tue, Feb 10 2026

  News Clip News Press Releases

  artificial intelligence generative ai Computer Vision Sports

  KAUST has been designated the first FIFA Research Institute in the Middle East and Asia, and the fifth worldwide, reflecting the University’s commitment to advancing innovation in football through cutting-edge scientific inquiry.

April 2025

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  Rising stars, global impact: KSA at the forefront of AI innovation

  1 min read · Tue, Apr 22 2025

  News Clip News

  AI Generative AI and LLMs LLM

  KAUST showcases global AI talent to power Saudi Arabia’s rise as a hub for innovation and leadership in artificial intelligence.

September 2024

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  KAUST Launches Four Pioneering Centers of Excellence to Address Key National and International Priorities

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 15 2024

  News Clip News

  KAUST has launched four pioneering Centers of Excellence to advance research and development in alignment with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, focusing on the critical areas of Health and Wellness, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Food Security, and Generative AI, thereby reinforcing the University’s role as a global leader in applied science and its commitment to delivering impactful solutions that drive national economic objectives.
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  KAUST Center of Excellence for Generative AI

  1 min read · Thu, Sep 12 2024

  News Clip News

  KAUST has established the Center of Excellence for Generative AI to position Saudi Arabia as a leader in this transformative technology, aligning with Vision 2030's goals for human capital development and economic diversification while focusing on research and applications that span health, sustainability, energy, and future economies, ultimately aiming to cultivate talent and foster innovative solutions tailored to the Kingdom’s needs.

July 2024

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  New Google collaboration advances AI research in Saudi Arabia

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 8 2024

  News Clip News

  Google has awarded $100,000 in seed research grants to KAUST's CEMSE faculty to advance multilingual, multimodal machine learning, fostering innovations in areas like health and education, with projects led by Tareq Al-Naffouri, Mohamed Elhoseiny, and Bernard Ghanem aimed at enhancing mobile networks and developing inclusive AI models.

May 2024

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  Counting the seeds of success

  1 min read · Tue, May 28 2024

  News Clip News

  A willingness to try anything and an adventurous spirit have taken Justine Braguy on a journey from plant science Ph.D. student to CEO of AI startup Thya Technology.

December 2022

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  Streamlining AI to enable DIY models

  3 min read · Thu, Dec 22 2022

  News

  Using artificial intelligence for scientific research across a number of disciplines has led to a new startup based on a powerful online tool, where users automatically generate their own machine-learning models.
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  Academic collaboration between KAUST and RWTH Aachen in a new project

  1 min read · Thu, Dec 1 2022

  News

  Between November 22nd and December 1st, 2022, the StochNum Research Group hosted Truong-Vinh Hoang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Mathematics for Uncertainty Quantification Chair in RWTH-Aachen. During his visit, Hoang worked with André Gustavo Carlon on a new project about the robustness certification of machine learning models, with the collaboration of Prof. Bernard Ghanem from the Visual Computer Center at the AI Initiative at KAUST. The main goal of this collaborative project is to develop numerical methods to improve the robustness of machine learning models to

June 2021

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  IVUL paper Wins Best Poster award at CVPR Workshop

  1 min read · Mon, Jun 21 2021

  News

  Computer Vision Deep learning artificial intelligence

  A paper by IVUL members won a Best Poster award at the LatinX in Computer Vision Workshop at CVPR 2021, the world-renowned venue for research in Computer Vision. The paper, "BAOD: Budget-Aware Object Detection", was written by four IVUL members, Alejandro Pardo, Mengmeng Frost Xu, Ali K. Thabet, and Bernard Ghanem, in collaboration with Professor Pablo Arbeláez, from Universidad de los Andes. The paper studies the efficiency with which object-detection systems learn when constrained by limited budgets. We congratulate the authors!
• 

  Hybrid First Principles-Machine Learning Models

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 15 2021

  News

  Aim: Bridge first-principles physical-chemical models with machine learning models. Property Prediction: ANNs trained on quantum descriptors Reactor Prediction and Control:Reinforcement learning for chemical process control Stochastic Event Prediction:Deep learning to predict rare combustion events Investigator: Mani Sarathy Xin gao Bernard Ghanem
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  Prof. Bernard Ghanem to give a talk at Machines Can See 2021

  1 min read · Mon, Jun 14 2021

  News

  Computer Vision artificial intelligence

  The fifth annual international summit ‘Machines Can See’ will host IVUL's own Prof. Bernard Ghanem as a speaker. The summit, to be held on July 8th 2021, is hosted by VisionLabs, a leading software company devoted to developing products based on state-of-the-art Computer Vision algorithms. The summit will be a space for Computer Vision and Machine Learning leading experts to discuss technology trends and share experience regarding human-centric technologies. Together with Prof. Bernard Ghanem, the summit will feature Professors Dima Damen, Efstratios Gavves, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, and
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  Inverse CFD design using a Deep Network Surrogate (CFD-Net)

  1 min read · Fri, Jun 4 2021

  News

  Problem we are facing: Because of the massive computational burden of typical inverse CFD design process, searching a wide variety of input geometry shape to optimize a payoff function (e.g. drag) is infeasible. How we aim to tackle it: To reduce the search space for new optimized shapes, we leverage the universal approximation property of deep neural networks to estimate a differentiable surrogate to the CFD forward simulation: CFD-Net. McLaren and Boeing have already expressed their interest to work with us on this line of research. Investigator: Matteo Parsani Bernard Ghanem

April 2021

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  Meet New KAUST Student: Juan C. Pérez

  2 min read · Tue, Apr 13 2021

  News

  Juan C. Pérez is a biomedical engineering graduate from Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia, who joined KAUST in January 2021. Juan first came to KAUST as an intern and was amazed by its excellent research atmosphere, environment, and resources. These factors served as an impetus in choosing KAUST as the destination to further his academic career.

December 2020

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  Professor Ghanem wins 2020 Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers

  3 min read · Wed, Dec 2 2020

  Awards Spotlight News

  machine learning big data

  Bernard Ghanem, KAUST associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, recently received the 2020 Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers for ''Machine Learning and Big Data.''

July 2020

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  KAUST Prospective student: Sara Rojas Martínez

  2 min read · Wed, Jul 15 2020

  News

  Sara Rojas Martínez is a 24-year-old Biomedical Engineering graduate from Bogotá, Colombia. Since childhood, Sara was fascinated by robots, technology, and artificial intelligence (AI). Her interest in technology motivated her to pursue a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. After obtaining her bachelor's degree from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, she realized that she wanted to do something related to AI and humans, so she also pursued her master’s degree from the same university.

December 2019

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  ActivityNet is featured in the 2019 Artificial Intelligence Index

  1 min read · Sun, Dec 15 2019

  News

  artificial intelligence Video Understanding

  ActivityNet is featured in the AI Index as the benchmark for the algorithms that can recognize human actions and activities from videos.

August 2019

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  Testing the blind spots in artificial intelligence

  1 min read · Thu, Aug 29 2019

  News

  machine learning artificial intelligence visual computing electrical engineering

  Understanding the situations when artificial intelligence can fail is critical for application of future autonomous vehicles and medical diagnostics.
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  Adel is invited to give a talk at the Phi's Research and Innovation Summit, in Dead Sea in Jordan Aug19.

  1 min read · Mon, Aug 19 2019

  News

  Phi's Research and Innovation Summit Dead Sea Jordan

  ​Adel is invited to give a talk at the Phi's Research and Innovation Summit, in Dead Sea in Jordan Aug19.​

June 2019

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  Renzo Caballero succesfully defended his MS Thesis

  1 min read · Fri, Jun 21 2019

  News

  Uruguay is a pioneer in the use of renewable sources of energy and can usually satisfy its total demand from renewable sources. Control and optimization of the system are complicated by half of the installed power - wind and solar sources - being non-controllable with high uncertainty and variability. In this work, we present a novel optimization technique for efficient use of the production facilities.
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  Adel won the outstanding reviewer award for CVPR19

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 16 2019

  News

  ​Adel won the outstanding reviewer award for CVPR19​

March 2019

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  Student Focus: Adel Bibi

  1 min read · Sun, Mar 24 2019

  Spotlight

  machine learning artificial intelligence

  KAUST Ph.D. student Adel Bibi, who works on bridging the gap between theory and practice in deep learning, believes we're living in a very exciting time.

February 2019

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  Beyond self-driving simulations: teaching machines to learn

  1 min read · Wed, Feb 13 2019

  News

  algorithm simulation UAV

  Teaching has the power to test the limits of one's knowledge. Teaching algorithms to learn using machine learning is making it possible for cars to do away with human drivers in the near future, but this has also opened up new questions about the limits of our knowledge of the brain and learning. Bernard Ghanem, KAUST associate professor of electrical engineering from the University's Visual Computing Center and principal investigator of the Image and Video Understanding Lab, applies machine learning techniques to computer vision for automated navigation (for example, self-driving cars and

January 2019

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  Matthias won the innovation Award in KAUST WEP Library ePoster Competition

  1 min read · Wed, Jan 23 2019

  News

  Innovation award wep ePoster Competition Driving Policy Transfer

  Matthias won the innovation Award in KAUST WEP Library ePoster Competition​. The work was titled "Driving Policy Transfer via Modularity and Abstraction"​.
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  Adel is invited to give a talk in EECVC on "Optimization meets Deep Learning"

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 22 2019

  News

  Deep learning optimization EECVC

  ​Adel is invited to give a talk in EECVC on "Optimization meets Deep Learning"​. It is a 45 minutes talk scheduled on the 6th of July 2019.

December 2018

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  KAUST Ph.D. student Matthias Mueller wins award for drone research

  2 min read · Thu, Dec 13 2018

  Awards Spotlight

  UAV

  KAUST Ph.D. student Matthias Mueller, who works in the Image and Video Understanding Lab under the supervision of KAUST Associate Professor Bernard Ghanem, won the Best Paper/Presentation Award at the 2nd International Workshop on Computer Vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs are commonly known as drones. The workshop was held in September 2018 in Germany in the post-proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Computer Vision workshops. Müller's paper entitled "Teaching UAVs to Race: End to End Regression of Agile Controls in Simulation" outlines the research of Müller and his
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  Prof. Ghanem will serve as AC for ICCV 2019

  1 min read · Sat, Dec 1 2018

  News

  Seoul Korea ICCV

  Prof. Ghanem will serve as AC for ICCV 2019​ to be held in Seoul Korea.​

November 2018

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  One Paper Accepted to WACV 2019

  1 min read · Tue, Nov 20 2018

  News

  WACV 2019 paper accepted underwater color enhancement

  ​One paper was accepted to WACV 2019. It deals with the topic of underwater color enhancement.​
• 

  One Oral Accepted to AAAI 2019

  1 min read · Thu, Nov 15 2018

  News

  Oral paper accepted robustness in VQA models

  One oral paper was accepted to AAAI 2019. It deals with the topics of robustness in VQA models.​

October 2018

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  Teaching algorithms to see

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 30 2018

  News

  UAV visual computing

  Four hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Other than using text to search the title, description or tags associated with a video, video content search is limited. In addition to helping users find content more quickly and accurately, the ability to search video content is of paramount importance to video platforms and advertisers. Last year, YouTube was embroiled in controversy after rolling video ads for Coca-Cola and Amazon, among others, were shown before racist and extremist content. Advertising content is a major revenue stream for video platforms like YouTube

July 2018

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  Six papers accepted to ECCV 2018

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 3 2018

  News

  ECCV

  6 papers accepted to ECCV 2018​

March 2018

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  Two Orals and three Posters Accepted to CVPR2018

  1 min read · Thu, Mar 1 2018

  News

  five papers accepted CVPR

  ​IVUL got 5 papers accepted to CVPR in total including 3 poster and 2 oral presentation.

February 2018

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  CVPR AC Meeting in Toronto

  1 min read · Thu, Feb 15 2018

  News

  CVPR

  ​Prof. Ghanem participated in the CVPR 2018 AC Meeting in Toronto.

October 2017

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  Invited talk at GTC Europe 2017

  1 min read · Thu, Oct 12 2017

  News

  talk GTC Europe 2017 GPU Technology Conference munich learning detection human activity in untrimmed video

  ​Prof. Ghanem gives an invited talk on learn​ing to detect human activity in untrimmed video at GTC Europe 2017

July 2017

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  Hosted the 2nd annual ActivityNet challenge in CVPR 2017

  1 min read · Wed, Jul 26 2017

  News

  Action Recognition Challenge untrimmed classification temporal localization dense captioning CVPR

  ​​IVUL hosted the 2nd annual ActivityNet Large Scale Action Recognition Challenge during CVPR 2017.
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  IVUL gets 3 papers accepted to ICCV 2017

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 17 2017

  News

  three paper accepted convolutional sparse coding line drawing analysis 3D object detection ICCV

  ​​IVUL got 3 papers accepted to ICCV 2017! These papers address research problems in convolutional sparse coding, line drawing analysis, and 3D object detection.​​​

May 2017

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  Abdullah Hamdi participates in global UNESCO event

  1 min read · Thu, May 4 2017

  News

  Youth and their Social Impact global UNESCO event Riyadh

  Abdullah Hamdi participates in global UNESCO event on “Youth and their Social Impact” in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
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  Adel Bibi and Matthias Mueller going to ICVSS 2017

  1 min read · Mon, May 1 2017

  News

  Italy Summer School Computer Vision ICVSS

  Adel Bibi and Matthias Mueller have been accepted to participate in the ICVSS (International Computer Vision Summer Schoole) 2017 in Italy. Admission into this summer school is quite competitive in the vision community.​​​

March 2017

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  Team KAUST places 3rd at the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge

  1 min read · Wed, Mar 29 2017

  News Spotlight

  robotics intelligent systems control systems

  A team from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) competed in the inaugural Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, March 2017, and took a 3rd place finish in the ground robotics challenge.
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  Six Papers accepted to CVPR17!

  1 min read · Fri, Mar 3 2017

  News

  CVPR

  6 CVPR papers got accepted!! 2 orals + 4 posters​​​

December 2016

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  Forbes ME ranks Hachid among the top 50 best startups in Saudi Arabia

  1 min read · Fri, Dec 16 2016

  News

  Forbes ME Top 50 Hachid

  Forbes ME ranks Hachid among the top 50 best startups in Saudi Arabia​​​​
• 

  One AAAI paper accepted!

  1 min read · Thu, Dec 15 2016

  News

  one paper accepted

  ​Our paper on binary optimization using MPEC reformulation got accepted to AAAI2017. Check it out in the publication tab​

November 2016

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  TAQADAM Grant from Sabb Bank

  1 min read · Tue, Nov 29 2016

  News

  TAQADAM Grant SABB Bank AR development wearable devices sensors sensory impaired

  ​Prof. Ghanem was awarded a TAQADAM grant from Sabb Bank for a project that focuses on developing AR on wearable devices for the sensory impaired.

October 2016

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  Helping computers to see who we really are

  1 min read · Sat, Oct 8 2016

  News

  algorithm machine learning algorithm

  Algorithms that train computers to automatically detect human activity in videos can improve online searches and real-world surveillance systems.

August 2016

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  Victor participates in the Deep Learning Summer School

  1 min read · Mon, Aug 8 2016

  News

  An IVUL Ph.D. student (Victor Escorcia) participated in the Deep Learning Summer School. He was selected among many students/researchers worldwide to attend this event, where he had the opportunity to interact with and learn from leaders in the field of deep learning.

July 2016

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  Fabian participates in the Computer Vision Summer School

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 24 2016

  News

  ICVSS PhD student participated IVUL international event

  An IVUL Ph.D. student (Fabian Caba)​ participates in the Computer Vision Summer School.
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  Four papers accepted to ECCV 2016!

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 11 2016

  News

  ECCV

  IVUL team got 4 papers accepted to ECCV!
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  Fabian and Victor participate in the annual MSR Summer School!

  1 min read · Fri, Jul 8 2016

  News

  PhD Summer School 2016 Computer Vision Deep learning

  Two IVUL Ph.D. students (Fabian Caba and Victor Escorcia) participate in the annual MSR Summer School.

June 2016

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  Best Business Plan at VIEW 2016

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 26 2016

  News

  CVPR high-tech startup Computer Vision robotics

  Hachid won the award for the Venture pitch with the best business plan at the Fifth Annual Vision Industry and Entrepreneur Workshop (VIEW) 2016.

April 2016

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  KAUST Discovery Article about SAR

  1 min read · Sun, Apr 17 2016

  News

  SAR stroke authorship recognition Kaust Discovery CGF 2015

  Our recent work on stroke authorship recognition (SAR) was highlighted in the KAUST Discovery webpage. This work was published in CGF2015.​​
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  A picture of the artist captured in a stroke

  1 min read · Sat, Apr 16 2016

  News

  stroke authorship recognition detecting fraudulent sketches

  A graphics technique is the first to identify people based on their sketching style.
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  MIT Tech Review Article

  1 min read · Thu, Apr 7 2016

  News

  An MIT Tech Review article was published about work done with Effat university undergrads, a very hard working bunch of young ladies

March 2016

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  ActivityNet Challenge starts!

  1 min read · Thu, Mar 24 2016

  News

  ​The first annual ActivityNet large-scale action recognition challenge is underway. A development kit, training, and validation subsets, and testing data without ground-truth annotations are available.
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  QNRF Proposal on Real-Time Sports Analytics Accepted!

  1 min read · Wed, Mar 23 2016

  News

  QNRF proposal with David Yang, Marianne Winslett, and Mounir Hamdi on "Real-Time Analytics for Sports Video Streams" is accepted!
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  Prof. Ghanem gives talk at KAUST-NSF conference

  1 min read · Wed, Mar 16 2016

  News

  ​Prof. Ghanem gave a talk on large-scale activity understanding at the annual KAUST-NSF conference.​
• 

  Three papers accepted to CVPR2016!

  1 min read · Tue, Mar 1 2016

  News

  IVUL got 3 papers accepted to CVPR2016! They focus on RGB tracking, RGBD tracking, and activity detection.

December 2015

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  First Annual ActivityNet Challenge to be held at CVPR2016!

  1 min read · Fri, Dec 18 2015

  News

  Our workshop proposal on large-scale human activity understanding was accepted to CVPR2016. We will be releasing the results of the 1st annual ActivityNet challenge during the workshop. This venue allows researchers in the field to evaluate their activity classification and detection techniques on a large-scale benchmark of in-the-wild video sequences.

November 2015

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  Two AAAI papers accepted!

  1 min read · Mon, Nov 16 2015

  News

  Out of 2 paper submissions, IVUL got 2 AAAI papers accepted!

August 2015

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  Three Papers Accepted to ICCV!

  1 min read · Fri, Aug 28 2015

  News

  ICCV three paper accepted

  IVUL got 3 papers accepted to ICCV, out of 3 submissions!​​​

May 2015

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  Computer vision: Teaching computers how to see the world

  1 min read · Wed, May 27 2015

  News

  semantic analysis artificial intelligence UAV

  Ghanem works in the Visual Computing Center (VCC) and is interested in computer vision, image processing, and machine learning.

April 2015

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  Two invitations to the MSR PhD Summer School

  1 min read · Wed, Apr 15 2015

  News

  Fabian Caba and Victor Escorcia get invited to the 10th Annual MSR Summer School at Cambridge, UK.

March 2015

• 

  Five Papers accepted to CVPR!!

  1 min read · Mon, Mar 2 2015

  News

  CVPR

  5 CVPR papers got accepted!!! 1 oral + 4 posters​​​​​
• 

  CIV Conference at KAUST

  1 min read · Sun, Mar 1 2015

  News

  CIV Conference​ at KAUST. Thanks to David Forsyth, Irfan Essa, Larry Davis, Shuicheng Yan, Yi Ma, Daniel Cremers, and ALL the other speakers!

February 2015

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  Google Faculty Research Award

  1 min read · Fri, Feb 13 2015

  News

  Awarded Google Faculty Research Award​ for ''ActivityNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Human Activity Understanding''!

December 2014

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  Invited Talk at ARAMCO

  1 min read · Mon, Dec 15 2014

  News

  Gave an invited talk the first annual Conference on Remote Sensing at ARAMCO in Dammam
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  Two Eurographics papers accepted

  1 min read · Mon, Dec 15 2014

  News

  eurographics two papers accepted publication

  2 Eurographics papers accepted to publication
• 

  Outstanding Reviewer for Pacific-Rim Multimedia

  1 min read · Mon, Dec 15 2014

  News

  Recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer for the Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia 2014.

November 2014

• 

  Attended ACCV 2014

  1 min read · Sat, Nov 1 2014

  News

  Presented 3 papers at ACCV 2014

June 2014

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  Ali Thabet wins SABIC fellowship

  1 min read · Mon, Jun 16 2014

  News

  postoc SABIC fellowship

  Ali Thabet wins the SABIC postdoctoral fellowship for the 2014-2015 year!

May 2014

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  PC Member for 2 ACCV Workshops

  1 min read · Mon, May 19 2014

  News

  Program Committee member of two workshops at ACCV 2014.