Projects and Collaborations

This group is tightly affiliated with the Digital Society Initiative, trying to brigde between different research groups in the whole University of Zurich.

The AIML group is invloved into several national and international research projects:

Biometric Recognition and Identification at Altitude and Range (BRIAR): 2021 - 2024

This project is a collaboration across four universities and one research institution, mostly hosted in the USA, and financed through the IARPA: https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/briar. The partners include:

• Kitware Inc. as the project lead
• Terry Boult from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS)
• University of South Florida represented bySudeep Sarkar and Shaun Canavan
• Suren Jayasuriya from the Arizona State University (second phase only)
• Lijun Yin from Binghampton University (second phase only)
• University of Notre Dame (first phase only) including Patrick Flynn, Adam Czajka, Jane Cleland-Huang and Kevin Bowyer

reSponsible fAir FacE Recognition (SAFER) (2022-2024)

This project is in collaboration with the Idiap Research Institute  and under the lead of Sébastien Marcel. It is financed through the Hasler foundation.

BioTinkering for Youth (2021-2023)

This project is a joint effort between the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the University of Basel. It is lead by the Zurich Basel Plant Science Center and finaced though the SNF as anAgora Project.

Several external visitors have stayed in the AIML group:

• Rafael Vareto has joined our team as a one-year exchange student between November 2021 and October 2022.
• Yugo Nakayama joined our group for a one-month visit in July 2022.
• Halil Bisgin spent his sabbatical in our group between September and December 2022.
• Shide Du from Fuzhou University visits our group from November 2023 to November 2024.
• Anderson Rocha  is researching on topics of digital forensics and biometrics at the University of Campinas, and visited our group for only one day.

The AIML group collaborates with other researchers and institutions. Master theses in the AIML group were written with the following collaborators:

• André Anjos from the Idiap Reseach Institute works on biosignal processing. We jointly supervise Master students on this topic, and we gave a summer school course for our PhD students.
• Stephanie Tanadini-Lang and Riccardo Dal Bello from the University Hospital investigate medical image processing for radio-oncology.
• Hooman Esfandiari from the Balgrist Hospital researches computer assisted orthopaedic surgery.
• Felice Pantaleo works on paricle shower at CERN.
• Moe Elgendi from ETHZ is involved in explainable medical image classification.
• Bernd Gärtner from ETHZ tries to teach teachers how to teach computer science to pupils.

Collaborations in terms of PhD thesis are as follows:

• Akshay Raj Dhamija wrote his PhD thesis entitled "Five Roads to Open-Set Recognition" at the Vision and Security Technology Lab
• Chunchun Li finished his PhD thesis on "Towards Fully Autonomous Clustering" at the Vision and Security Technology Lab
• Arthur Schwaninger wrote his PhD thesis at the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy about "The Predicted World -- A Neuroscience and Machine Learning Approach to Metaphysics".
• Steve Cruz currently finished his PhD thesis entitled "Improving Open-Set Performance" at  the Vision and Security Technology Lab
•  Jose Angel Pineda Ortiz currently works on his PhD thesis at theLaboratory of Neural Circuit Assembly.
• Peng Yan works on "Robust Deep Learning for Industrial Applications"  at ZHAW.

Next to the research in our field, we also have several activities in a larger context.

• We are actively involved in the Center for Reproducible Science.
• We are invited as an expert for fraud detection in emission certificate trading, jointly with the German Intitute for Applied Ecology.
• We participated in a Policy Sprint on the topic of How Artificial Intelligence contributes to the Sustainability in Switzerland.
• We were involved into the discussion on how Artificial Intelligence will speed up Innovation at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
• We participated in the Briefing from the Zurich Cantonal Parliament on the topic of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.
• As a member of the European Association for Biometrics, we gave a talk at the EAB and CITeR Biometrics Workshop