Israeli Computer Vision Expert Joins Alibaba's Push for New Retail, City Brain
Liao Shumin
DATE:  Nov 22 2018
/ SOURCE:  yicai
Israeli Computer Vision Expert Joins Alibaba's Push for New Retail, City Brain Israeli Computer Vision Expert Joins Alibaba's Push for New Retail, City Brain

(Yicai Global) Nov. 22 -- Lihi Zelnik-Manor, an expert in computer vision and an associate professor at Israel Institute of Technology's Electrical Engineering Department (Technion), has joined the local machine vision laboratory owned by an Alibaba-backed research institute.

As lab head she will lead its team to conduct basic research into computer vision and integrate research and corresponding achievements with applications in new retail, smart city and other fields in mind, China's state online media The Paper reported yesterday, citing the DAMO -- Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook -- Academy, which is dedicated to developing leading technologies that Hangzhou-headquartered Alibaba Group Holding operates.

Alibaba Israel Machine Vision Laboratory is one of the global research institutes DAMO Academy has acquired and is also its first research and development team exclusively composed of foreign scientists.

Its members come from the US Intel, South Korean Samsung, Tel Aviv University and other world-class research units.

The R&D lab DAMO Academy has set up in Israel will serve as a future innovation hub combining advantages from China and Israel, popularizing technologies and incubating new business models, the academy stated.

The computer vision technology the facility is working on will improve computer understanding of the external and physical world, e.g. video understanding technology will enhance Alibaba City Brain's ability to recognize vehicular movement and pedestrian behavior to more efficiently manage urban roads and transit.

City Brain monitors every vehicle in Hangzhou in south-central China and has helped cut traffic jams by 15 percent, Conde Nast Britain-run Wired.Co.uk reported.

The technology can also apply in new retail to enable smart shelves and AI cashiers to more precisely identify customers' buying behavior and realize automatic payment and intelligent loss prevention.

Zelnik-Manor obtained her PhD in computer science from Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and joined the Technion in 2007 as an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and researcher at its Computer Graphics & Multimedia Lab.

Her research focuses on computer vision and analysis of video and image set content in real scenarios, public data show.

She also won the Best Student Paper Award from the New York-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Best Paper Award from the International Conference on Computer Vision sponsored and convened by IEEE every other year. She has been appointed as the chairs of the European Conference on Computer Vision, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition and other forums related to computer vision for several straight years. 

She is also the core editor of Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, which is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the IEEE Computer Society.

DAMO Academy has set up research and development centers and labs in Singapore, the US and many other countries and regions in addition to Israel.

It has also built joint research bases with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, the University of California, Berkeley, Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Editor: Ben Armour

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Keywords:   Alibaba,DAMO Academy