Cees Snoek

Full professor in computer science at the University of Amsterdam
Director of the QUVA Lab, the joint research lab of Qualcomm and the University of Amsterdam

- Title of the talk:
Activity Understanding

- Abstract:

- Short biography:

Cees G.M. Snoek is a full professor in computer science at the University of Amsterdam, where he heads the Intelligent Sensory Information Systems Lab. He is also a director of the QUVA Lab, the joint research lab of Qualcomm and the University of Amsterdam on deep learning and computer vision. At University spin-off Kepler Vision Technologies he acts as Chief Scientific Officer. Professor Snoek is also the director of the master program in Artificial Intelligence and co-founder of the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence.

He received the M.Sc. degree in business information systems (2000) and the Ph.D. degree in computer science (2005) both from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was previously an assistant (2011-2013) and associate professor (2013-2017) at the University of Amsterdam, as well as Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, USA (2003), Fulbright Junior Scholar at UC Berkeley (2010-2011), head of R&D at University spin-off Euvision Technologies (2011-2014) and managing principal engineer at Qualcomm Research Europe (2014-2017). His research interests focus on video and image recognition. He has published over 200 refereed book chapters, journal and conference papers, and frequently serves as an area chair of the major conferences in multimedia and computer vision.

Professor Snoek is the lead researcher of the award-winning MediaMill Semantic Video Search Engine, which is the most consistent top performer in the yearly NIST TRECVID evaluations. He was general chair of ACM Multimedia 2016 in Amsterdam, program chair for ICMR 2017, and initiator of the VideOlympics 2007-2009. He is a lecturer of post-doctoral courses and tutorials given at international conferences and European summer schools. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM. He is currently a member of the editorial board for ACM Transactions on Multimedia. Cees is recipient of an NWO Veni award (2008), a Fulbright Junior Scholarship (2010), an NWO Vidi award (2012), and the Netherlands Prize for ICT Research (2012). All for research excellence. Several of his Ph.D. students and Post-docs have won awards, including the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award (2012) the SIGMM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2013), the Best Paper Award of ACM Multimedia (2014), an NWO Veni award (2015) and the Best Paper Award of ACM Multimedia Retrieval (2016). Five of his former mentees serve as assistant and associate professors.