Rate My Professor Wael Abd Almageed

Wael Abd Almageed is a tenured full professor in the Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. From 2013 to 2023, he served as Research Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and as Research Director and Distinguished Principal Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute, both units of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He founded the USC Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory (VIMAL). Abd Almageed received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering with Distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2003 and was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student award there. His earlier degrees include an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Mansoura University in Egypt in 1997, a B.S. in electrical engineering from the same institution in 1994, and a graduate diploma in software engineering from the Information Technology Institute in Egypt in 1997, obtained via a scholarship for distinguished graduates from Egyptian universities.

Abd Almageed's research interests include representation learning, debiasing and fair representations, multimedia forensics and visual misinformation identification such as deepfake and image manipulation detection, face recognition, and biometric anti-spoofing. He leads multi-institution research efforts including DARPA's MediFor, GARD, and LwLL, and IARPA's Janus, Odin, and BRIAR. He has over 100 publications in top-tier computer vision, machine learning, and biometrics venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, ECCV, ACM MM, PAMI, TBIOM, and ICB. Notable publications include "Mantra-net: Manipulation tracing network for detection and localization of image forgeries with anomalous features" (Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2019) and "Unsupervised Adversarial Invariance" (NeurIPS, 2018). He received the USC Information Sciences Institute Achievement Awards in 2022 and 2019. His research has been featured in Forbes, Glamour UK, Fox News, Time For Kids, and PCMag, highlighting its influence on combating visual misinformation and advancing secure AI technologies.