Joe (Zhou) Ren - Home Page

Joe (Zhou) Ren - 任洲
Head of Vision Research, Just-Walk-Out Technology (Google Scholar, Linkedin)
Amazon AWS, Seattle, WA

<We are hiring Computer Vision researchers!>

Publish under Zhou Ren
Email: renzhou200622 [at-gmail] [dotcom]
Contact me with your CV if you are interested in full-time or doing an internship with us. :)

About me

I am leading a team (of Applied Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers) working on Amazon's Just Walk Out (JWO) technology - the cashierless technology that powers Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, and JWO as a Service to third party retailers. My team focuses to understand customer's shopping behavior using visual signal and Computer Vision technologies such as action understanding, product analysis, model quantization, edge computing, and Vision Foundation Model, etc.

Previously, I was a Principal Research Manager and founding member of Wormpex AI Research, the AI branch of BianLiFeng (便利蜂), which was a top-10 convenience store chain in China. 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 Research, working on multimodal understanding to support Snapchat’s content monetization, content security, and creative content creation.

I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2016, and my M.Eng degree from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2012. Before that, I received my 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.
Financial Chair of ICME 2024. 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, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. I have worked on Human Centric Understanding (including 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.), shape understanding, adversarial machine learning, etc.

My current focuses are: 1. human centric understanding (pose, hand, gesture, human Re-ID, and tracking); 2. object detection, action detection and video representation learning, 3. multi-modal joint understanding, vision and language.