Event Details

In this talk, we introduce VIMAL to the ISI family. VIMAL is the new Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory at ISI. We will talk about VIMAL’s mission for developing machine learning, computer vision and biometric systems that make the world a better place. We will also talk about VIMAL’s long term vision and commitment to inspiring and empowering students in the uber competitive deep learning era, and our emphasis on publishing world-class papers as well as quality engineering and system prototypes. We will give a brief overview of VIMAL’s two main research thrusts – multimedia forensics and biometrics and ongoing efforts to apply modern computer vision and machine learning methods in medicine and health care. Finally, we will talk about VIMAL’s structure and our research and project management approach. The word vimal also means pure in Hindi, and it reflects our commitment to making the world a better place, one day at a time.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Wael Abd-Almageed is a Research Associate Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Director with Information Sciences Institute, both are units of USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is the Founding Director of the Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory (VIMAL). He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1994 and his M.S. in computer engineering in 1997 from Mansoura University in Egypt. He also earned a graduate software engineering diploma in 1997 from the Information Technology Institute in Egypt via a scholarship granted to distinguished graduates from Egyptian universities. He obtained his Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2003 where he was also awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student award. Prior to joining ISI, Dr. AbdAlmageed was a research scientist with the University of Maryland at College Park, where he led several research efforts for various NSF, DARPA and IARPA programs. His research interests include representation learning, debiasing and fair representations, multimedia forensics and visual misinformation identification (such as deepfake and image manipulation detection) and face recognition and biometric anti-spoofing. Dr. AbdAlmageed leads several multi-institution research efforts, including DARPA’s MediFor, GARD and LwLL and IARPA’s Janus, Odin and BRIAR. He has over 90 publications in top computer vision, machine learning and biometrics conferences and journals, including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, ECCV, ACM MM, PAMI, TBIOM and ICB. Dr. AbdAlmageed is the recipient of 2019 USC Information Sciences Institute Achievement Award. His research has also been featured on CNN,  Forbes, Glamour UK, Fox News, Time For Kids and PCMag.

Dr. Leonidas Spinoulas has been a Computer Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute (University of Southern California), Marina del Rey, CA since 2017. He has been one of the main contributors for ISI’s project under IARPA’s Odin program and he is currently the Co-PI for ISI’s project under IARPA’s BRIAR program. He received his Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 2010. In September 2010 he joined Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA and the Image and Video Processing Laboratory (IVPL) under the supervision of Prof. Aggelos K. Katsaggelos. He received the M. Sc. Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2012 and the Ph.D. degree from the same department in August 2016.. He was previously a Research Scientist for Ricoh Innovations Corporation, Cupertino, CA, USA. He was the recipient of the best paper awards at EUSIPCO 2013 and SENSORCOMM 2015 and has over 25 published papers and 4 patents.

Dr. Mohamed Hussein is a Computer Scientist and a Research Lead at USC ISI. Mohamed obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park, MD, USA in 2009. Then, he spent close to two years as an Adjunct Member Research Staff at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, MA, before moving to Alexandria University, Egypt, as a faculty member. Prior to joining ISI in 2017, he spent three years at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), Alexandria, Egypt. During his time as a faculty member in Egypt, Dr. Hussein was the PI/Co-PI on multiple industry and government funded research projects on Sign Language Recognition and Crowd Scene Analysis. He is currently a Co-PI for ISI’s projects under IARPA’s Odin and BRIAR programs and DARPA’s GARD program.

Dr. Lida Dimitropoulou is Project Manager at the Information Sciences Institute. In this position she oversees the planning, coordination and execution of government funded research projects, and supports the writing of new proposals, the submission of IRB protocols, and the regular communication with the subwardees. Prior to joining ISI, she worked as Project Manager and Research Administrator of national, international and European Commission projects at the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens and the School of Environmental Engineering of the Technical University of Crete where she also held a research position in environmental multi-level and participatory governance. With her combined experience in academic research and project management she has contributed to the management of many ISI projects including IARPA’s  BRIAR, THOR, CAUSE, TILES, and MERCURY, and DARPA’s GARD and MEDIFOR.

Host: Deborah Khider, POC: Peter Zamar

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