Ali Athar

Ali Athar

Research Scientist

ByteDance Inc.

Biography

I work as a Research Scientist at ByteDance in San Jose, California. Previously, I did my PhD in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen University (Germany) under the supervision of Prof. Bastian Leibe. My research interests include video understanding, and object tracking and segmentation.

Interests
  • Computer Vision
  • Video Understanding
  • Object Tracking and Segmentation
Education
  • PhD in Computer Science, 2019 - 2024

    RWTH Aachen University (Aachen, Germany)

  • MSc. in Communications Engineering, 2016 - 2019

    Technical University of Munich (Germany)

  • BE in Electrical Engineering, 2012 - 2016

    National University of Sciences and Technology (Islamabad, Pakistan)

Publications

(2023). 4D-Former: Multimodal 4D Panoptic Segmentation. In CoRL.

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(2023). TarViS: A Unified Approach for Target-based Video Segmentation. In CVPR (Highlight).

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(2023). BURST: A Benchmark for Unifying Object Recognition, Segmentation and Tracking in Video. In WACV.

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(2022). HODOR: High-level Object Descriptors for Object Re-segmentation in Video Learned from Static Images. In CVPR (Oral).

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(2022). Differentiable Soft-Masked Attention. In CVPR-W.

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(2022). D^2-Conv3D: Dynamic Dilated Convolutions for Object Segmentation in Videos. In WACV.

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(2021). A Single-Stage, Bottom-up Approach for Occluded VIS using Spatio-temporal Embeddings. In ICCV-W.

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(2020). Making a Case for 3D Convolutions for Object Segmentation in Videos. In BMVC.

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(2020). STEm-Seg: Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos. In ECCV.

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(2019). Whole-body motion and footstep planning for humanoid robots with multi-heuristic search. Robotics and Autonomous Systems.

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(2016). Whole-body motion planning for humanoid robots with heuristic search. In IROS.

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Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Research Scientist
ByteDance Inc.
Feb 2024 – Present San Jose, USA
 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern
Jan 2023 – Jun 2023 Toronto, Canada
 
 
 
 
 
Conference Reviewer
Jun 2019 – Present
ICRA 2019, BMVC 2020, CVPR 2021, ICCV 2021, BMVC 2021, CVPR 2022, ECCV 2022, CVIU
 
 
 
 
 
Teaching Assistant
RWTH Aachen
Oct 2019 – Present
Machine Learning (Winter 2019 and Winter 2020), Computer Vision (Winter 2021)
 
 
 
 
 
Working Student 3D Robotics and Perception
Feb 2017 – Mar 2019 Munich, Germany
Worked as a part-time software engineer and for some time as a research intern. Areas of work included 3D mapping, projection geometry, image and point-cloud manipulation. Languages/APIs: C++, Python, ROS, OpenCV

Awards and Scholarships

Outstanding Reviewer Award
Wrote Exemplary reviews for manuscripts submitted to CVPR 2022.
High Distinction
Completed master’s degree with CGPA of 1.2/5.0 on German scale (~3.8/4.0 on US scale)
Chancellor’s Silver Medal
Completed bachelor’s degree with second-highest CGPA in graduating class (3.93/4.0)
Excellence Scholarship
Partial tuition fee waiver on acccount of >3.6 CGPA throughout all semesters of bachelor’s degree

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