Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering | Deputy Director of AI Initiative at KAUST
Research Interests
Professor Ghanem's research interests focus on topics in computer vision, machine learning, and image processing. They include:
Modeling dynamic objects in video sequences to improve motion segmentation, video compression, video registration, motion estimation, and activity recognition.
Developing efficient optimization and randomization techniques for large-scale computer vision and machine learning problems.
Exploring novel means of involving human judgment to develop more effective and perceptually-relevant recognition and compression techniques.
Developing frameworks for joint representation and classification by exploiting data sparsity and low-rankness.
Selected Publications
Tianzhu Zhang, Bernard Ghanem, Si Liu, and Narendra Ahuja, "Robust Visual Tracking via Structured Multi-Task Sparse Learning", International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV 2013)
Tianzhu Zhang, Bernard Ghanem, Si Liu, and Narendra Ahuja, "Low-Rank Sparse Coding for Image Classification", International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2013)
Bernard Ghanem and Narendra Ahuja, "Dinkelbach NCUT: A Framework for Solving Normalized Cuts Problems with Priors and Convex Constraints", International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV 2010)
Bernard Ghanem and Narendra Ahuja, "Maximum Margin Distance Learning for Dynamic Texture Recognition", European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2010)
Bernard Ghanem and Narendra Ahuja, "Phase Based Modeling of Dynamic Textures", International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2007)
Education
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 2010
M.S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 2008
B.E., American University of Beirut (AUB), 2005
Professional Profile
Research Scientist, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), 2012
Senior Research Scientist, Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) of Illinois in Singapore, 2011
Postdoctoral Fellow, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 2010
Awards
Awarded the Shoman Arab Researcher Award for the topic of Machine Learning and Big Data (2020)
Winner of 3D Instance Segmentation task in ScanNet Benchmark Challenge at CVPR (2019)
Best business plan award in the Vision Industry Entrepreneur Workshop (VIEW 2016) at CVPR (2016)
Google Faculty Research Award based on a project entitled "ActivityNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Human Activity Understanding"; 1st and only award in MENA for Machine Perception (2015)
SABIC Postdoctoral Award (2014-2015)
Research Collaboration Award from the University of Western Australia (2014)
KAUST Seed Fund Award (2013-2015)
Ranked first in the IEN (Illinois Entrepreneur Network) business plan competition (2009)
Recipient of the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Fellowship at UIUC (2007-2009)
Recipient of the James M. Henderson Fellowship at UIUC (2006-2007)
Ranked first among all sections of the Lebanese Baccalaureate (National Examinations) and the Presidential Award for Academic Excellence from the Lebanese Ministry of Education (2000-2001)
KAUST Affiliations
Red Sea Research Center (RSRC)
Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division (BESE)
Visual Computing Center (VCC)
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE)
