Faculty

Research Scientists

Vitaly Ablavsky

Vitaly is a Senior Research Scientist in the IVC group of the Dept. of Computer Science at Boston University, working in computer vision and machine learning. His current specialties include object detection/tracking and video-based activity analysis.

Research Assistant Professors

Sarah Adel Bargal

Sarah is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science of Boston University. Sarah first joined the IVC Group in 2013 as a PhD student working with Stan Sclaroff, and later as a Postdoctoral Associate working with Stan Sclaroff and Kate Saenko. In December 2018, she received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University. Previously, Sarah received a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo, after which she served as a lecturer of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Gulf University for Science and Technology. Sarah received her B.Sc. in Computer Science from Kuwait University. Sarah’s research interests are in machine learning, computer vision, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a current focus on making artificial intelligence systems explainable and accountable to humans and society.

Bryan Plummer

Bryan’s research interests lie within the broad umbrella of artificial intelligence with particular interests in visual recognition, scene understanding, and relating visual data with text. Bryan previously received a PhD in the computer vision group at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign advised by Professor Svetlana Lazebnik, after which he was a Postdoctoral associate at BU, working with professors Kate Saneko and Stan Sclaroff, until August 2019.

PhD Students

Dina Bashkirova

Dina is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Boston University, who started in 2018 and is advised by Prof. Kate Saenko and Prof. Margrit Betke. Prior to starting the PhD, she received her BSc and MSc in Computer Science at Kazan Federal University. Her research is focused on computer vision, deep learning and pixel-level domain adaptation. Specifically, she is interested in realistic unsupervised image-to-image and video-to-video translation using generative models. She is also passionate about computer-aided healthcare systems.

Andrea Burns

Andrea is a second year PhD student in the Image and Video Computing Group. She is advised by Professor Kate Saenko and Professor Bryan A. Plummer. Andrea works on problems at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing (vision and language). Prior to joining Boston University, she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tulane University.

Qi Feng

Qi Feng, also know as Fred Fung, joined the Image and Video Computing group at Boston University in 2017. He is advised by Professor Stan Sclaroff. His research interests lie in the intersection of deep learning, computer vision with applications in natural language understanding. Before joining IVC, he received his Masters of Science degree in Computer Science at New York University.

Ping Hu

Ping Hu joined the Image and Video Computing Group as a Ph.D. student in 2018. He is advised by Prof. Stan Sclaroff and Prof. Kate Saenko. His research focuses on computer vision and deep learning, particularly on image segmentation and video analysis. Before joining IVC, he spent two years at Nanyang Technological University as a research student. He got his Master’s degree from China Academy of Science in 2016.

Yifu Hu

Yifu joined the Image and Video Computing Group as a Ph.D. student in 2017. He is advised by Prof. Margrit Betke. Before joining BU, he was a master’s student at Tsinghua University, China where he obtained his M.S. Degree in July, 2017. His primary research interests are computer vision and machine learning.

Mona Jalal

Mona is a CS Ph.D. student in computer vision working with Professor Margrit Betke. Prior to joining BU, she was an R&D Engineer 1 at University of California, Berkeley working on gesture recognition for augmented reality at Center for Augmented Cognition with Dr. Allen Yang. Prior to that she obtained a double degree master’s in EE and CS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014 and 2016 respectively. Her main interests are language and vision, semantic segmentation, action recognition, gesture recognition and facial analysis and in a broader term applying machine learning and deep learning methods to problems in the natural language understanding, computer/robot vision and human-centered artificial intelligence.

Donghyun Kim

Donghyun is a Ph.D. student in the Image and Video Computing Group, which he joined in 2017. He is advised by Prof. Stan Sclaroff. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where he worked on 3D face modeling and recognition with Prof. Gerard Medioni and Dr. Jongmoo Choi in the Computer Vision Group. His research interests are in the areas of computer vision and deep learning.

Sid Mysore

Sid joined the Image and Video Computing group in 2017. He is currently advised by Prof. Kate Saenko. Prior to starting his PhD at BU, he obtained a MSE in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania and a MEng in Mechatronic Engineering from The University of Nottingham. Sid’s interests are in Reinforcement Learning and improving the utility of Machine Perception in more natural environments. He is especially interested in the potential impact of such studies applied to robotics and augmented reality.

Xingchao Peng

Xingchao is a Ph.D student advised by Prof. Kate Saenko, and joined IVC group in 2016. His research interest focuses on computer vision and machine learning, particularly on transfer learning, object classification and detection. Before joining IVC, he spent two years of his Ph.D career in University of Massachusetts Lowell. He got his bachelor’s degree from EECS department of Peking University in 2013. During undergraduate study, he did some research work on scene recognition in PKU ICTS LAB, advised by Prof. Yuxin Peng.

Vitali Petsiuk

Vitali is a Ph.D student advised by Prof. Kate Saenko. He joined IVC group in 2017. His research interest focuses on computer vision and machine learning, particularly on explainable and interpretable AI. He got his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Belarusian State University where he did some research work on Image Segmentation.

Wenda Qin

Wenda is a Ph.D student advised by Prof. Margrit Betke. He joined IVC group in 2018. His primary research interests are in computer vision and machine learning. Prior to joining the PhD program, he received a Master’s in Computer Science at BU, and a Bachelor’s in Engineering at the South China University of Technology

Vasili Ramanishka

Vasili joined the Image and Video Computing research group at Boston University in 2016, and is advised by Prof. Kate Saenko. Currently he is working on applications of machine learning to image and language understanding.

Nataniel Ruiz

Nataniel is a PhD Candidate in the Image and Video Computing group at Boston University, currently advised by Professor Stan Sclaroff. His research is centered around computer vision and machine learning. He has worked on several topics including visual data simulation, face and gesture analysis, scene understanding, first person vision, instructional video understanding and reinforcement learning. Previously he obtained an M.Sc. at Georgia Tech and his B.S./M.Sc. at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Kuniaki Saito

Kuniaki is a Ph.D student advised by Prof. Kate Saenko, and join IVC group in 2018. He received his Master’s degree from the University of Tokyo, where he worked on domain adaptation with Prof. Tatsuya Harada and Dr. Yoshitaka Ushiku. His research interest focuses on computer vision and machine learning. Currently, he is working on domain adaptation for computer vision.

Elham Saraee

Elham joined the Image and Video Computing group at Boston University after completing her Bachelors in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology. She is advised by Prof. Margrit Betke and Prof. Stan Sclaroff. Her research focuses on computer vision and applied machine learning. In particular, she is interested in facial, gesture and posture analysis of humans.

Ximeng Sun

Ximeng is a Ph.D. Student who joined the Computer Science Department at Boston University in Spring, 2019. She is advised by Prof. Kate Saenko. Her research mainly focuses on the deep learning and computer vision, with an emphasis on video-level deep generative models. Before joining IVC, she received her Master of Science degree in the Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Reuben Tan

Reuben joined the Image and Video Computing group as a PhD student in 2018. He is advised by Professor Kate Saenko. His primary research interests lie in applications of machine learning in vision-language tasks and video understanding.

Ben Usman

Ben joined the Image and Video Computing group at Boston University in 2016. He is advised by Prof. Kate Saenko. His research interests lie in the intersection of deep learning, Bayesian inference and numerical linear algebra with applications in natural language and image understanding. Before that, he earned a degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Xide Xia

Xide is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Boston University. She is advised by Professor Brian Kulis. Her academic interests broadly include deep learning, image segmentation, video representation learning, and metric learning for image retrieval. Before BU, she received an ME in Computational Science and Engineering at Harvard completed her undergraduate studies at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Yi Zheng

Yi started the PhD program in the computer science Department at Boston University in 2017. He is advised by Prof. Margrit Betke. Prior to joining BU, Yi graduated from the University of Southern California and worked as an algorithm engineer in image quality team in General Electrics, Healthcare department for one year. His primary research interests focus on computer vision and machine learning. In the past year, he has worked on object detection for digital radiography and X-ray equipment.

Samarth Mishra

Samarth is a PhD student in the Image and Video Computing group, advised by Prof. Derry Wijaya and Prof. Kate Saenko. He started his PhD in Fall 2019. Previously, he received his master’s degree in Spring 2019 from Georgia Tech, where he was advised by Prof. James Rehg at the Computational Perception Laboratory. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Spring 2017 from IIT Bombay, where his thesis work was advised by Prof. Suyash Awate.

UROP/REU and MA students

Alumni