Shu Kong

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I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Macau, where I lead the Visual Intelligence Lab. I am also a Research Affiliate at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, and a Project Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. I completed my postdoc training at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where I was supervised by Deva Ramanan. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, where I was advised by Charless Fowlkes.

My research vision is to establish the foundations of Visual Intelligence: enabling machines to perceive, understand, reason about, and interact with the visual world in open, dynamic, and continually evolving environments. To realize this vision, I pursue two complementary research directions. The first, Open World Vision (OWV), moves beyond the closed-world assumptions of conventional computer vision to develop Visual Intelligence systems that are robust, generalizable, and trustworthy amid the real-world complexities. My ICCV'21 paper that described continual novelty and open-world data was recognized for Best Paper / Marr Prize. The second, AutoExpert, seeks to scale domain expertise by equipping these systems to acquire, represent, and apply expert knowledge, making expertise-intensive applications, such as autonomous systems and scientific discovery, more accessible. To instantiate AutoExpert, I have been democratizing Visual Intelligence in scientific fields such as palynology, paleoecology, and evolutionary biology. My previous system for high-throughput pollen analysis, published in PNAS, was featured by the U.S. NSF that "opens a new era of fossil pollen research".

I am actively looking for self-motivated PhD students at the University of Macau. PhD students will be fully funded with fellowships.

Email contact

  • related to UM: skong [at] um [dot] edu [dot] mo
  • related to OIST: shu.kong [at] oist [dot] jp
  • others: aimerykong [at] gmail [dot] com
  • related to TAMU: shu [at] tamu [dot] edu

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