Joe (Zhou) Ren - Home Page
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Joe (Zhou) Ren - 任洲 (Google Scholar, Linkedin)
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About me
I am leading a team of Applied Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers working on Amazon's Just Walk Out (JWO) technology - the autonomous retailing technology that powers JWO as a Service on AWS to third party retailers. My team is in charge of developing algorithms for human-centric understanding (activity, human-object-interaction, product identification, counting, etc), planogram intelligence, and 3D space modeling using Vision Language Models (VLM), Large Video Models (LVM), and Geometry Foundation Model (GFM).
Previously, I was one of the three founding members and a Principal Research Manager of Wormpex AI Research, the AI branch of BianLiFeng (便利蜂), which was a top-10 convenience store chain in China (2021). I was responsible for building state-of-the-art human-centric AI technologies to facilitate new retail business from new site selection, storefront management, to storefront operation. Before that, I was a senior research scientist at Snap Inc., working on multimodal understanding to support Snapchat’s content monetization, content security, and creative content creation. From 2010 to 2012, I was a researcher at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) working on hand gesture recognition using depth sensor.
I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2016, part-time M.Eng degree from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2012, and Bachelor’s degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 2010.
Selected honors: 1. The 1st Prize in ICCV 2021 Low Power Computer Vision Challenge (among 31 teams); 2. Runner-up winner in NIPS 2017 Adversarial Attack and Defense Competition (among 107 teams); 3. “CVPR 2017 Best Student Paper Award” nominee; 4. winner of the “IEEE Trans. on Multimedia 2016 Best Paper Award”; 5. developed the first part-based hand gesture recognition system using Kinect sensor with Nanyang Technological University and Microsoft Research Redmond (Demo1, Demo2, Demo3). I’m a senior member of IEEE.
Services
Area Chair of CVPR 2021, CVPR 2022, WACV 2022, WACV 2023, WACV 2024, WACV 2025, ECCV 2026.
Finance Chair of ICME 2024, ICASSP 2027. Demo Chair of VCIP 2022. Senior Program Committee of AAAI 2021, AAAI 2022.
Associate Editor of The Visual Computer Journal (TVCJ), 11/2018 - present.
Chair of Industrial Publication Committee, Industrial Governance Board, Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA).
Research Highlights
My research interests lie in the fields of Computer Vision, Multimedia, and Natural Language Processing.
I have worked on Large Video Model (VLM), Vision-Language Models (VLM), and Geometry Foundation Models (GFM) for Human Centric Understanding (including video activity understanding, hand gesture recognition, hand pose estimation, human pose estimation and tracking, human ReID, action detection, etc.), Multi-modal Joint Understanding (including image captioning, video captioning, visual-semantic embedding, etc.), 3D reconstruction, shape understanding, adversarial machine learning, etc.