Rate My Professor Hisham Cholakkal

Hisham Cholakkal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Vision at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and an M.Tech. in Digital Signal Processing from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in India. Prior to joining MBZUAI, he held research and technical leadership positions at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE, Mercedes-Benz R&D India, BEL Central Research Laboratory in India, and the Advanced Digital Sciences Center in Singapore, accumulating more than twelve years of experience in computer vision and multimodal AI.

Professor Cholakkal’s research focuses on the intersection of computer vision and multimodal learning, with emphasis on foundation models, multimodal large language models, healthcare applications, and advanced visual recognition architectures. As principal investigator at MBZUAI, he has secured more than eight research grants and awards, including the Meta Llama Impact Innovation Award in 2024, the NVIDIA Academic Grant in 2025, the Meta Regional Research Grant in 2025, and the Google Gift Research Award in 2023. He has published more than 100 research papers and holds more than eight granted U.S. patents. His contributions have been recognized with the inaugural MBZUAI Teaching Excellence Award in 2025 and the MBZUAI Founding Service Award. He serves as General Chair of ACM Multimedia Asia 2026 and Local Chair of ACCV 2028, and has held Area Chair positions at conferences including CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, ACM Multimedia, ECCV, and BMVC. He is also Associate Editor for Pattern Analysis and Applications and IET Computer Vision, and has organized multiple workshops on foundation models and vision transformers.