Ziming Zhang

Ziming Zhang

Assistant Professor \ ECE Department & Data Science & Robotics Engineering \ Worcester Polytechnic Institute

I am always looking to hire talented PhD students. Please contact me zzhang15@wpi.edu.

Vision, Intelligence, and System Laboratory (VISLab) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is led by Prof. Ziming Zhang. The aim of the lab is to engage in the state-of-the-art research into the mathematical foundation of computer vision (CV) and artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as the system design and engineering that meets the needs of society. Current research focus is TEAM-Efficient Learning:

  • Training Efficiency: Improving the convergence and training speed of learning algorithms.
  • Inference Efficiency: Developing real-time algorithms for broader applicability.
  • Data Efficiency: Training (deep) models using small amount of (even no) training samples.
  • Model Efficiency: Developing hardware-friendly lightweight (deep) models & algorithms.

About Me

I am an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before joining WPI I was a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in 2016-2019. Prior to that, I was a research assistant professor at Boston University, a postdoc at Boston University working with Prof. Venkatesh Saligrama (Fellow of IEEE) and a postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill working with Prof. Dinggang Shen (now at the ShanghaiTech University, Fellows of IEEE, AIMBE, IAPR). I received PhD in 2013 from Oxford Brookes University, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Philip H. S. Torr (now at the University of Oxford, Fellows of the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering). My research areas lie in computer vision and machine learning, especially in deep learning, zero-shot learning, optimization, 2D/3D object recognition/detection/segmentation, person re-identification, video retrieval, point cloud processing, IoT, autonomous driving, and time-series data analysis. My works have appeared in PAMI, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, NIPS, ACM MM, ICDM. I serve as a review/PC member for top conferences (e.g. CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, AISTATS, IJCAI) and journals (e.g. PAMI, IJCV, JMLR). My work “Deep Learning-based Water Detector” won the R&D100 Award 2018.

Recent News

  • 12/20/2023. One paper was accepted to International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2024.
  • 12/05/2023. One paper was accepted to World Scientific Annual Review of Artificial Intelligence, 2023.
  • 09/28/2023. One paper was accepted to IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2023).
  • 09/21/2023. One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
  • 08/28/2023. Welcome Hangrui Zhang to join our lab as a PhD student.
  • 08/11/2023. One paper was accepted to The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2023.
  • 07/14/2023. One paper was accepted to ICCV 2023.
  • 06/23/2023. One paper was accepted to Energies.
  • 03/17/2023. One paper was accepted to The 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Network (IEEE IFIP DSN 2023).
  • 02/27/2023. One paper was accepted to CVPR 2023 as a highlight.
  • 12/26/2022. Two papers were accepted to SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2023).
  • 11/24/2022. One paper was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics.
  • 11/09/2022. Two papers were accepted to Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS) Annual Meeting, 2023.
  • 11/01/2022. Invited as a member of the Scientific Program Committee for the 10th IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS2023)
  • 10/29/2022. One paper was accepted to BigData 2022.
  • 10/10/2022. One paper was accepted to WACV 2023.
  • 10/07/2022. One paper was accepted to IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2022).
  • 08/30/2022. Our REU work (undergrad team) was accepted to IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference 2022.
  • 08/23/2022. One paper was accepted to ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022.
  • 07/08/2022. One paper was accepted to Sensors.
  • 07/03/2022. One paper was accepted to ECCV 2022.
  • 06/27/2022. One paper was accepted to Twenty Fourth Congress of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology.
  • 06/17/2022. One paper was accepted to Neurocomputing.
  • 04/22/2022. My co-supervised project “A Portable Teleoperated Robot for Ultrasound Diagnostic Imaging” won the 2nd place in the MQP competition in Mechanical Engineering at WPI.
  • 03/02/2022. I gave a talk “On the training stability of recurrent neural networks” at AI TIME
  • 03/01/2022. One paper was accepted to CVPR 2022.
  • 02/08/2022. One paper was accepted to Pattern Recognition.
  • 01/31/2022. One paper was accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.
  • 01/06/2022. Invited as an Editor for Journal of Information Technology and Integrity.
  • 12/09/2021. Congratulations to Dr. Yecheng Lyu to pass his PhD thesis defense!!!
  • 12/09/2021. Congratulations to Dr. Guojun Wu to pass his PhD thesis defense!!!
  • 12/04/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM).
  • 11/23/2021. Welcome Fangzhou Lin to join our lab as a visiting scholar!
  • 11/10/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS).
  • 10/15/2021. One paper was accepted to BMVC 2021.
  • 10/14/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE Access.
  • 10/11/2021. Our work “Neural Activity & Visual Stimuli: How the Brain Sees Video” earned the best poster award in IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC), 2021.
  • 10/04/2021. One paper was accepted to WACV 2022.
  • 09/28/2021. One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2021.
  • 09/01/2021. Welcome Xuechu Yu to join our lab!
  • 08/31/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine.
  • 08/31/2021. Two papers was accepted to IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2021 as regular paper.
  • 08/25/2021. Welcome Yiqing Zhang to join our lab!
  • 07/27/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2021.
  • 07/22/2021. One paper was accepted to International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2021.
  • 07/15/2021. One paper was accepted to 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC) 2021.
  • 06/30/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2021.
  • 06/14/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS) 2021.
  • 06/10/2021. Invited as an Associate Editor for International Robotics & Automation Journal.
  • 05/17/2021. One paper was accepted to PAMI.
  • 03/03/2021. One paper was accepted to CVPR 2021.
  • 02/25/2021. Invited as a Topic Editor for Journal of Imaging.
  • 02/23/2021. One paper was accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
  • 02/19/2021. Guest Editor for special issue on Collective Behavior Analysis and Graph Mining in Social Networks 2021 in Complexity.
  • 01/28/2021. Welcome Yuping Shao to join our lab!
  • 01/09/2021. Our 2nd workshop Vision Applications & Solutions to Biased or Scarce Data at WACV 2021 was held successfully.
  • 11/10/2020. One paper was accepted to ACS Sensors.
  • 10/11/2020. Three papers were accepted to ICPR 2020.
  • 09/25/2020. One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2020.
  • 08/31/2020. Welcome Yun Yue to join our lab!
  • 08/20/2020. One paper was accepted to ICDM 2020.
  • 08/14/2020. Grateful to receive an NSF award for Knowledge Integrated Data-Efficient Deep Learning.
  • 07/28/2020. One paper was accepted to MICCAI ASMUS 2020.
  • 07/28/2020. One paper was accepted to ACM MM 2020.
  • 07/01/2020. Our team achieved Rank-1 in the leaderboard of AI City Challenge 2020 Track3: City-Scale Multi-Camera Vehicle Re-Identification. See our demo video for visual analysis.
  • 03/13/2020. One paper was accepted to CVPR 2020 as oral.
  • 03/05/2020. Our workshop Vision Applications & Solutions to Biased or Scarce Data at WACV 2020 was held successfully.
  • 03/01/2020. Two papers were presented at WACV 2020.
  • 01/31/2020. I gave a talk at United Imaging Intelligence (UII), Cambridge, MA.
  • 01/15/2020. I gave a talk at Wayfair, Boston, MA.
  • 12/19/2019. One paper was accepted to ICLR 2020 as poster.
  • 11/22/2019. Two proposals were funded by GDMS’s University RFP program.
  • 10/01/2019. Joined in WPI as assistant professor.

Funding Sponsors

We sincerely appreciate the support from

  • National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS)