Conference Tutorials

Arun Ross is the Martin J. Vanderploeg Endowed Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University and serves as the Site Director of the NSF Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR). He received his B.E. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Michigan State University. Prof. Ross is an internationally recognized expert in biometrics, computer vision, privacy, artificial intelligence, and deep learning. His research focuses on trustworthy and responsible AI, biometric recognition, pattern recognition, and human-centered security technologies. He is a recipient of several prestigious honors, including the NSF CAREER Award, the IAPR JK Aggarwal Prize, and the Young Biometrics Investigator Award. He is also an IAPR Fellow and has actively contributed to global discussions on biometrics, privacy, and digital identity systems through collaborations with organizations including the United Nations and NATO.

Salman H. Khan is an Associate Professor at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and an adjunct faculty at at College of Electrical & Computer Science (CECS), Australian National University (ANU). His research lies at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and multimodal artificial intelligence, with major contributions in vision-language models, continual learning, prompt learning, generative AI, and learning from limited data. He has extensively worked on large multimodal models for image and video understanding, robust and generalizable AI systems, and AI applications in earth observation, climate science, and remote sensing. Prior to joining MBZUAI, he served as a Senior Scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence and as a Research Scientist at Data61-CSIRO, Australia. Prof. Khan has authored more than 200 publications in leading AI conferences and journals and has received several prestigious recognitions including the Fulbright Scholarship, IPRS Scholarship, and multiple best paper and outstanding reviewer awards.

Hisham Cholakkal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Vision at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision, multimodal learning, and foundation models, with a strong focus on large multimodal models (LMMs), vision-language models (VLMs), conversational AI, and real-time multimodal reasoning systems. He has extensive experience spanning academic research, teaching, and industrial AI product development, having previously held research and technical leadership positions at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), Mercedes-Benz R&D India, BEL Central Research Laboratory, and the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Singapore. His recent work focuses on developing omnimodal AI systems capable of seamlessly integrating vision, speech, audio, and text across multiple languages and cultures, with applications in healthcare, smart wearables, human-centered AI, and intelligent interactive systems.