News

March 2026

• 

  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

• 

  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.

September 2024

• 

  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.
• 

  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.

May 2024

• 

  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.

May 2023

• 

  Soccernet Brings AI To The Game

  1 min read · Mon, May 15 2023

  News

  Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to augment our understanding and enjoyment of sport. Work toward this goal requires the dedication and vision of avid fans.

June 2021

• 

  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!
• 

  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
• 

  Seven IVUL members recognized as Outstanding Reviewers by CVPR 2021

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 13 2021

  News

  Computer Vision Pattern Recognition artificial intelligence

  The 2021 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) has granted Outstanding Reviewer awards to seven members of IVUL: Alejandro Pardo, Ali Thabet, Chen Zhao, Mattia Soldan, Mengmeng Xu, Juan C. Pérez, and Silvio Giancola. CVPR, a premier annual computer vision event that will take place virtually from June 19th to June 25th, is the largest computer vision conference in the world, gathering researchers from academia and industry alike. The peer-review process through which the conference determines acceptance of papers relies on expert reviewers from across the world
• 

  SDAIA, KAUST sign MoU to develop AI research and innovation in Saudi Arabia

  1 min read · Wed, Jun 9 2021

  News

  artificial intelligence

  Saudi Gazette report JEDDAH — The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have signed a memorandum of understanding to unite efforts to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and modern technologies in the Kingdom. The MoU was signed by the CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence, the innovative arm of SDAIA, Dr. Majid Al-Tuwaijri, and by KAUST President, Professor Tony Chan, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Thursday. The MoU supports science and technology research and improves its quality

April 2021

• 

  Meet New KAUST Student: Juan C. Pérez

  1 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

  1 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.''

August 2020

• 

  Abdullah Hamdi Received The Best Paper Award in an ECCV Workshop

  1 min read · Tue, Aug 25 2020

  News

  The 2020 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2020) is the top European conference in the image analysis area. One of their workshops aims to bring together researches from the fields of adversarial machine learning, robust vision and explainable AI to discuss recent research and future directions for adversarial robustness and explainability, with a particular focus on real-world scenarios. From the Adversarial Robustness in the Real World, ECCV 2020 workshop, Abdullah Hamdi (PhD student at IVUL) received the Best Paper Award.
• 

  Alejandro Pardo Received The Outstanding Reviewer Award from BMVC

  1 min read · Tue, Aug 25 2020

  News

  The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) annual conference on machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. It is one of the major international conferences on computer vision and related areas held in the UK. With increasing popularity and quality, it has established itself as a prestigious event on the vision calendar. For its 31st conference, Alejandro Padro (PhD student at IVUL) was recognized by the BMVC 2020 community as an outstanding peer reviewer.

July 2020

• 

  KAUST Prospective student: Sara Rojas Martínez

  1 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.

November 2019

• 

  Student Focus: Abdullah Hamdi

  1 min read · Thu, Nov 21 2019

  Spotlight

  student focus

  KAUST Ph.D. student Abdullah Hamdi began his university studies at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where he specialized in electrical engineering. After graduating from KFUPM in 2016, he moved to KAUST for his master's degree ('18) and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning and computer vision. At KAUST, Hamdi is part of Associate Professor Bernard Ghanem's Image and Video Understanding Lab. Ghanem, a member of the University's Visual Computing Center, seeks to teach machines to

August 2019

• 

  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.
• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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
• 

  Matthias Mueller Wins the Innovation Award

  1 min read · Tue, Feb 12 2019

  Awards Spotlight

  student award Poster Competition

  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 13 th until 24 th of January, 2019. The winners received their awards at the Final Gala that was held to celebrate the end of the tenth annual Winter

January 2019

• 

  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"​.
• 

  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

  1 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
• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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
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  Aerial Path Planning for Urban Scene Reconstruction: A Continuous Optimization Method and Benchmark

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 16 2018

  News

  optimization urban planning

  Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are ideal capturing devices for high-resolution urban 3D reconstructions using multi-view stereo. Nevertheless, practical considerations such as safety usually mean that access to the scan target is often only available for a short amount of time, especially in urban environments. It, therefore, becomes crucial to perform both view and path planning to minimize flight time while ensuring complete and accurate reconstructions. In this work, we address the challenge of automatic view and path planning for UAV-based aerial imaging with the goal of urban

July 2018

• 

  Six papers accepted to ECCV 2018

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 3 2018

  News

  ECCV

  6 papers accepted to ECCV 2018​

March 2018

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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.
• 

  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

• 

  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
• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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.
• 

  Four papers accepted to ECCV 2016!

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 11 2016

  News

  ECCV

  IVUL team got 4 papers accepted to ECCV!
• 

  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

• 

  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

• 

  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.​​