Matthias Mueller Wins the Innovation Award

Matthias Mueller receives the innovation award in the Final Gala Ceremony

Matthias Mueller, a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, who works in the Image and Video Understanding lab (IVUL) under the supervision of Professor Bernard Ghanem, was awarded the Innovation Award at the WEP Library E-Poster Competition on the poster "Driving Policy Transfer via Modularity and Abstraction".

The competition was held at the campus library as part of the Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) 2019 that took place in KAUST from the 13th until 24th of January, 2019. The winners received their awards at the Final Gala that was held to celebrate the end of the tenth annual Winter Enrichment Program.

The poster represents and summarizes the research of Mueller and his colleagues Alexey Dosovitskiy, Bernard Ghanem, Vladlen Koltun:

"We transfer autonomous driving policies from simulation to reality via modularity and abstraction. The driving policy is encapsulated such that it is not directly exposed to raw perceptual input or low-level vehicle dynamics. We evaluate our approach in simulated urban environments and in various real-world conditions in Germany and in KAUST."

Mueller joined KAUST in 2014 as a master student in Electrical Engineering. After that, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program to continue his research in the fields of computer vision, robotics and machine learning. Matthias has extensive experience in object tracking and autonomous navigation of embodied agents such as cars and UAVs.

On Behalf of the Visual Computing Center, congratulations.