Rate My Professor Zhiqiang Shen

Zhiqiang Shen is an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), where he leads the VILA Lab. His research interests focus on the broad areas of efficient deep learning, machine learning, and computer vision. Specifically, he works on deep learning methods for image recognition and object detection, efficient deep architectures, parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies, low-bit neural networks, knowledge distillation for models and data, designing and training highly efficient network architectures for CNNs and transformers, un/self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning, image understanding including object detection, recognition, and captioning, and few-shot learning.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Shen was an assistant research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He was a postdoctoral researcher at CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Before that, he was a joint-training Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Fudan University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Fudan University and was a joint-training Ph.D. student in engineering at UIUC. He was also an IAS Junior Fellow from the Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study at HKUST. Professor Shen has received the CVPR 2019 doctoral consortium award and the AAAI 2019 student scholarship award, along with strong rankings in several international challenges such as the iMaterialist Challenge and MSR-VTT Challenge. He has authored numerous papers in top venues including ECCV, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, AAAI, and NeurIPS. He serves as a reviewer for top-tier computer science conferences and journals and was a meta-reviewer (SPC) at AAAI 2023. He has also received a Google Research Award Grant.