The “KAUST Workshop on Applied Geometry and Visual Computing” brings together leading scientists from Europe and the United States, presenting their latest results in - Applied and Discrete Differential Geometry - Geometry Processing - Computational Fabrication The talks are related to various problems in Applied Mathematics in general and to further areas of Visual Computing such as Computer Graphics, Physical Simulation and Scientific Visualization. The workshop provides a great opportunity to learn about latest developments and to discuss ongoing work with top researchers in the field.

I will present a data science pipeline which starts with Earth observation data arriving in the ground segment of a satellite mission and ends with a complete user application. I will first briefly present all the tools my group has been developing since 2010 for supporting the various stages of the pipeline. Then, I will concentrate on the recently developed system Strabo 2 which can store big geospatial data encoded in RDF and query them using the Open Geospatial Consortium standard GeoSPARQL. Strabo 2 is the only parallel and distributed RDF store available today that can manage terabytes of geospatial data efficiently.

Inevitably, the projection of most graph structures on two-dimensional screens will create errors and therefore visually wrong impressions. In the past, two types of methods have been developed to minimize projection errors and distribute them in a visually pleasing way. The first group of methods, force-directed layouts, interpret the links of a graph as physical springs, while stress-based methods minimize an energy function, which aims to map graph distances faithfully.

In computer vision, generative AI models are typically built for images, videos, and 3D objects. Recently, there has emerged a paradigm of neural fields, which unifies the representations of such types of data by parametrizing them via neural networks. In this thesis, we develop generative models for images, videos, and 3D scenes which treat the underlying data in such a form and explore the benefits which such a perspective provides.

The success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has resulted in unprecedented quality both for image generation and manipulation. Recent state-of-the-art GANs (e.g., the StyleGAN series) have demonstrated outstanding results in photo-realistic image generation. In this dissertation, we explore the latent space properties, including image manipulation, extraction of 3D properties, and performing various weakly supervised and unsupervised downstream tasks using StyleGAN and its derivative architectures.

Entrepreneurs continue to be the driver for economic development and innovation. Some startups invent brand new markets while other manage to enter markets crowded by existing large companies. In this seminar we will explore making critical early decisions starting from chaos and creating an exciting new business. We will gain insights on the value of learning by doing, prototyping, discussing tradeoffs between analysis, experimentation and scale.  We will also review courses offered by KAUST Entrepreneurship Center.

In this work we focus our attention on distributed optimization problems in the context where the communication time between the server and the workers is non-negligible. We obtain novel methods supporting bidirectional compression (both from the server to the workers and vice versa) that enjoy new state-of-the-art theoretical communication complexity for convex and nonconvex problems.

In this talk, we will define prototypical random walks, a mechanism we introduced to improve visual classification with limited data (few-shot learning), and then developed the mechanism in a conceptually different way to facilitate novel image generation and unseen class recognition tasks. More specifically, in the few-shot learning setting, we will show how we can develop a random walk semi-supervised loss that enables the network to learn representations that are compact and well-separated.

With video data dominating the internet traffic, it is crucial to develop automated models that can analyze and understand what humans do in videos. Such models must solve tasks such as action classification, temporal activity localization, spatiotemporal action detection, and video captioning. This dissertation aims to identify the challenges hindering the progress in human action understanding and propose novel solutions to overcome these challenges.

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) ensure the confidentiality and integrity of computations in hardware. Subject to the TEE's threat model, the hardware shields a computation from most externally induced fault behavior except crashes. As a result, a crash-fault tolerant (CFT) replication protocol should be sufficient when replicating trusted code inside TEEs.  However, TEEs do not provide efficient and general means of ensuring the freshness of the external, persistent state. Therefore, CFT replication is insufficient for TEE computations with an external state, as this state could be rolled back to an earlier version when a TEE restarts.  Furthermore, using BFT protocols in this setting is too conservative, because these protocols are designed to tolerate arbitrary behavior, not just rollback during a restart.

Building on the work of Schöberl, Olshanskii, and Benzi, in this talk we present the first preconditioner for the Newton linearization of the stationary Navier--Stokes equations in three dimensions that achieve both optimal complexity in of count and Reynolds-robustness. The exact details of the preconditioner varies with discretization, but the general theme is to combine augmented Lagrangian stabilisation, a custom multigrid prolongation operator involving local solves on coarse cells, and an additive patchwise relaxation on each level that captures the kernel of the divergence operator.

This seminar focuses on providing the audience with the context and scope of our internship program. The program is for the young and talented graduate students with an active interest in solving real-world problems. Some of the projects that will be presented in the seminar are actively developed in Elm and include domains such as computer vision, robotics and automation, healthcare, IoT, video analytics, and NLP. The seminar will serve as a launch pad to allow students to discuss their future interests and aspirations with the speaker. It will also enable them to develop a better awareness of domains more relevant to their future research aspirations.

In this talk, I will first give a convergence analysis of gradient descent (GD) method for training neural networks by relating them with finite element method. I will then present some acceleration techniques for GD method and also give some alternative training algorithms

Parameter-free online optimization is a class of algorithms that does not require tuning hyperparameters, yet they achieve the theoretical optimal performance. Moreover, they often achieve state-of-the-art performance too. An example would be gradient descent algorithms completely without learning rates. In this talk, I review my past and present contributions to this field. Building upon a fundamental idea connecting optimization, gambling, and information theory, I discuss selected applications of parameter-free algorithms to machine learning and statistics. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the future directions of this field.

The aim of this course is to familiarize the students with the usage of Computer Simulation tools for complex problems. The course will introduce the basic concepts of computation through modeling and simulation that are increasingly being used in industry and academia. The basic concepts of Discrete Event Simulation will be introduced along with the reliable methods of random variate generation and variance reduction. Later in the course, the concept of simulation-based optimization and output analysis will be discussed. The example of simulation (and optimization) applied to design an optimal organ allocation policy in the US will be discussed.

The aim of this course is to familiarize the students with the usage of Computer Simulation tools for complex problems. The course will introduce the basic concepts of computation through modeling and simulation that are increasingly being used in industry and academia. The basic concepts of Discrete Event Simulation will be introduced along with the reliable methods of random variate generation and variance reduction. Later in the course, the concept of simulation-based optimization and output analysis will be discussed. The example of simulation (and optimization) applied to design an optimal organ allocation policy in the US will be discussed.

In this talk I will report on various research projects that I carried out with my students to better understand the interaction landscape and will report on lessons we learned. I will focus mostly on AR-based setups with application examples from physical flow visualization, molecular visualization, visualization of particle collisions, biomolecular dynamics in cells, and oceanography. I will show interaction techniques that rely on purely gestural interaction, phones or tablets as input and control devices, and hybrid setups that combine traditional workstations with AR views. I will discuss navigation, data selection, and visualization system control as different interaction tasks. With this overview I aim to provide an understanding of typical challenges in immersive visualization environments and how to address some of these challenges.

From my experience, I will try to answer doubts and dilemmas PhD students are often faced with, in their path towards a degree. Namely, I'll discuss how advisors, colleagues, peers, reviewers and so forth, fit in the universe of a PhD student, and I will end sharing my own definition of 'excellence', as an objective to pursue.

Skoltech Applied AI center’s mission is to create AI models and frameworks for solving the problems of sustainable development of industry and economy. In my presentation, I will overview the current center's activities, applied and fundamental problem statements, and corresponding recent results.

In the big data era, it is necessary to rely on distributed computing. For distributed optimization and learning tasks, in particular in the modern paradigm of federated learning, specific challenges arise, such as decentralized data storage. Communication between the parallel machines and the orchestrating distant server is necessary but slow. To address this main bottleneck, a natural strategy is to compress the communicated vectors. I will present EF-BV, a new algorithm which converges linearly to an exact solution, with a large class of deterministic or random, biased or unbiased compressors.

Random fields are popular models in statistics and machine learning for spatially dependent data on Euclidian domains. However, in many applications, data is observed on non-Euclidian domains such as street networks. In this case, it is much more difficult to construct valid random field models. In this talk, we discuss some recent approaches to modeling data in this setting, and in particular define a new class of Gaussian processes on compact metric graphs.

This talk will focus on challenges and opportunities in designing middleware for HPC, AI (Deep/Machine Learning), and Data Science. We will start with the challenges in designing runtime environments for MPI+X programming models by considering support for multi-core systems, high-performance networks (InfiniBand and RoCE), GPUs, and emerging BlueField-2 DPUs. Features and sample performance numbers of using the MVAPICH2 libraries will be presented. For the Deep/Machine Learning domain, we will focus on MPI-driven solutions to extract performance and scalability for popular Deep Learning frameworks (TensorFlow and PyTorch), large out-of-core models, and Bluefield-2 DPUs.

Machine perception that corresponds to the ability to understand the visual world based on the input from sensors, such as cameras is one of the central problems in Artificial Intelligence. To this end, recent years have witnessed tremendous progress in various instance-level recognition tasks having real-world applications in e.g., robotics, autonomous driving and surveillance. In this talk, I will first present our recent results towards understanding state-of-the-art deep learning-based visual recognition networks in terms of their robustness and generalizability. Next, I will present our results on learning visual recognition models with limited human supervision. Finally, I will discuss moving one step further from instance-level recognition to understand visual relationships between object pairs.

In this thesis, we discuss a few fundamental and well-studied optimization problem classes: decentralized distributed optimization (Chapters 2 to 4), distributed optimization under similarity (Chapter 5), affinely constrained optimization (Chapter 6), minimax optimization (Chapter 7), and high-order optimization (Chapter 8). For each problem class, we develop the first provably optimal algorithm: the complexity of such an algorithm cannot be improved for the problem class given. The proposed algorithms show state-of-the-art performance in practical applications, which makes them highly attractive for potential generalizations and extensions in the future.

In this talk, I will discuss communication compression and aggregation mechanisms for curvature information in order to reduce these costs while preserving theoretically superior local convergence guarantees.