Zhou Ren (任洲) Senior Research Lead (CV, Google Scholar, Linkedin) Wormpex AI Research, Bellevue, WA <We are hiring Computer Vision researchers!> Email: renzhou200622 [at] gmail.com Contact me with your CV if you are interested in full-time or doing an internship with us. :)

About me

• Zhou is a technical innovator, actively seeking solutions to build and enhance real-world products. He is a founding member of Wormpex AI Research, the AI branch of BianLiFeng (便利蜂), a fast growing advanced convenience store chain in China backed by a global capital (which has opened over 1000 convenience stores from scratch within the past 2 years). At Wormpex AI research, they build state-of-the-art AI technologies to facilitate new retail logistics from storefronts, warehouses to manufacture. Before that, Zhou has spent 3 wonderful years at Snap Research as a senior research scientist, leading the effort of applying multimodal understanding to support Snap’s content monetization, content security, and creative content creation.

• As a senior research lead at Wormpex AI Research, Zhou is managing a Multimodal Machine Perception Team, composed of elite researchers and engineers in both Bellevue, WA and Beijing, China. His team are building intelligent product systems and conducting cutting edge research to benefit Bianlifeng’s retail business, based on multimodal input signals, including visual, textual, and acoustic, etc.

• Zhou received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2016, and his M.Eng degree from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2012. Before that, he received his Bachelor’s degree with highest honor from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 2010.

• Zhou is an active researcher. His research interests include Computer Vision, Multimedia, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He has worked on problems of hand, gesture, human pose, multi-modal joint understanding, image and video captioning, object detection, action detection, human ReID, shape understanding, reinforcement learning, and adversarial machine learning, etc.

• Selected honors: (1) Runner-up winner in NIPS 2017 Adversarial Attack and Defense Competition (among 107 teams); (2). been nominated to the “CVPR 2017 Best Student Paper Award”; (3). winner of the “IEEE Trans. on Multimedia 2016 Best Paper Award”; (4). developed the first part-based hand gesture recognition system using Kinect sensor with Nanyang Technological University and Microsoft Research Redmond (Demo1, Demo2).

News

• [05/20] One paper accepted by CVPR 2020 on object detection. One paper accepted by ECCV 2020 on pose estimation and tracking. Congratulations to my mentored student (Shiyi Lan) and collaborators!

• [01/20] I will serve as an Area Chair of CVPR 2021. And I am invited to serve as a Director of Industrial Governance Board, Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) since Jan 2020.

• [11/19] Two papers accepted by IEEE Trans on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) on video captioning and object detection. Congratulations to my mentored student (Sheng Liu, Hongyu Xu) and collaborators!

• [07/19] Two papers accepted by ICCV 2019 on action detection and ReID. One paper accepted by BMVC 2019 as an Oral on hand pose estimation. Three papers accepted by CVPR 2019, two as Orals on hand shape estimation and dense video captioning, and one as Poster on adversarial machine learning. Congratulations to my mentored students (Tan Yu, Tianlong Chen, Liuhao Ge, Jonghwan Mun, Cihang Xie) and collaborators!

• [12/18] I have recently joined Wormpex AI Research, to assist our executives set up and grow a research group in visual recognition & analysis for future retail business at BianLiFeng (便利蜂).

• [07/18] Been invited to present in a panel discussion at ICME 2018, together with Dr. Tao Mei, Dr. Wenjun Zeng, Prof. Xilin Chen, Prof. Mohan Kankanhalli, and Prof. Junsong Yuan.

• [11/17] We have won the 2nd place in NIPS’17 Adversarial Defense Challenge among 107 teams; and were invited to present in NIPS’17 Competition Track (for details, please check our work).

• [08/17] Our work on hand gesture recognition is ranked the most cited paper in IEEE TMM since 2011. Our TWO works on hand gesture recognition are ranked the most cited paper && the 2nd most cited paper in ACM MM 2011.

• [07/17] Our paper on Reinforcement Learning-based Image Captioning has been nominated to the “Best Student Paper Award” at CVPR 2017!

• [06/16] Our paper “Robust Part-based Hand Gesture Recognition Using Kinect Sensor” has been selected to receive the 2016 IEEE Trans. on Multimedia Prize Paper Award (TMM Best Paper Award)!

Research

• My research interests lie in the fields of Computer Vision, Multimedia, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. I have worked on hand, gesture, human pose, multi-modal joint understanding, image and video captioning, object detection, action detection, human ReID, shape understanding, reinforcement learning, adversarial machine learning, etc.

• My current research focuses include: 1) human pose, hand, and gesture, 2) object detection, action detection, and human Re-ID, 3) multi-modal joint understanding, vision and language.

Publications

(Note: “^” indicates the co-author is the student I mentored during whose internship or during an university collaboration)

1. on Hand, Gesture, and Human Pose

2. on Multi-Modal Joint Understanding, Vision and Language

3. on Object Detection, Action Detection, and Person Re-Identification

4. on Adversarial Machine Learning

5. on Shape Representation, and Shape Coding

6. on Medical Image Processing

Selected Patents

• System and method for robust hand gesture recognition using commodity depth sensor, Singapore provisional patent application, filed in 10/2011
  Co-invented with Junsong Yuan, Jingjing Meng

• Modeling semantic concepts in an embedding space as distributions, US patent application, filed in 01/2016
  Co-invented with Hailin Jin, Zhe Lin, and Chen Fang

• Embedding-driven image captioning using deep reinforcement learning and lookahead beam search, US patent application, filed in 11/2016
  Co-invented with Xiaoyu Wang, Ning Zhang, Xutao Lv, and Jia Li

• Generating Data in a Messaging System for a Machine Learning Model, US patent application, filed in 12/2017
  Co-invented with Zehao Xue

• Query Matching to Media Collections in a Messaging System, US patent application, filed in 01/2018
  Co-invented with Roger Luo, Sushobhan Nayak, Xinran He, and Christophe Van Gysel

• Device Location based on Machine Learning Classifications, US patent, granted in 05/2018
  Co-invented with Ebony Charlton, Sumant Hanumante, Dhritiman Sagar

• Embedding space for images with multiple text labels, US patent, granted in 07/2018
  Co-invented with Hailin Jin, Zhe Lin, and Chen Fang

Mentored Student Collaborators

(I have been fortunate to work with many talented students during their internships or university collaborations :) )

• Lluis Castrejon (2017 Summer), PhD student at MILA, University of Montreal
  

• Zhe Li (2017 Summer), PhD student at University of Iowa
  

• Hongyu Xu (2017 Summer), PhD student at University of Maryland, College Park
  

• Cihang Xie (2017 Fall - 2018 Spring), PhD student at Johns Hopkins University
  

• Sheng Liu (2017 Fall - 2019 Fall), PhD student at The State University of New York at Buffalo
  

• Liuhao Ge (2018 Spring - 2019 Spring), PhD student at Nanyang Technological University
  

• Tan Yu (2018 Summer), PhD student at Nanyang Technological University
  

• Shibi He (2018 Summer), PhD student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  

• Jonghwan Mun (2018 Summer), PhD student at Pohang University of Science and Technology
  

• Tianlong Chen (2019 Spring), PhD student at Texas A&M University
  

• Ye Yuan (2019 Spring), PhD student at Texas A&M University
  

• Wuyang Chen (2019 Spring), PhD student at Texas A&M University
  

• Shiyi Lan (2019 Summer), PhD student at University of Maryland, College Park
  

• Zhenyu Wu (2020 Summer), PhD student at Texas A&M University
  

• Yiding Yang (2020 Summer), PhD student at Stevens Institute of Technology
  

• Tongzhou Mu (2020 Summer), PhD student at University of California, San Diego

Teaching

• Teaching Associate of CS32 Introduction to Computer Science II (data structures and algorithms) with Prof. Carey Nachenberg
  [discussion materials]

• Teaching Assistant of CS31 Introduction to Computer Science I (C++ programming) with Prof. David Smallberg
  [discussion materials]

Professional Activities

• Area Chair of CVPR 2021.

• Associate Editor of The Visual Computer Journal (TVCJ).

• Director of Industrial Governance Board, Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA).

• Program Committee of CVPR 2017, FG 2018 2019, IJCAI 2018 2019, ECAI 2018, ACM Multimedia 2018 2019, AAAI 2019, etc