Profiles

Mattia Soldan is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAUST, where he is advised by Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, with a focus on scalable and efficient algorithms for semantic video understanding and retrieval. His work spans task-specific deep learning architectures, dataset creation, and efficient visual encoding pipelines. Mattia is passionate about building intelligent systems that connect visual content with language and advancing research that bridges fundamental understanding with practical impact.

Mattia's research focuses on video and language understanding and especially on how to leverage mutual information to solve specific tasks as Single Video Moment Retrieval and Video Corpus Moment Retrieval.

Research Interests

Motasem is interested in computer vision, machine learning, and continual learning.

Dr. Nasir Alfaraj is a KAUST Ibn Rushd Fellow at the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, in 2019. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned his B.Sc. (2013) from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA, and his M.Sc. (2015) from KAUST. Dr. Alfaraj is currently a Research Associate with the Helmy Group, and his research interests encompass the growth, fabrication, and characterization of CMOS-compatible semiconductor nanostructures and devices for nanophotonic applications, utilizing hybrid metallic architectures. He is an IEEE Senior Member.

Nasir's research investigated the design and clean-environment fabrication of solid-state and optoelectronic devices, including field-effect transistors and light-emitting diodes. His research expertise spans the areas of flexible electronics; optoelectronic device growth, fabrication, and characterization; and free-space optical communication. His research interests included Growth, fabrication, and characterization of group-III-nitride-based nanostructures for next-generation devices, Semiconductor physics and Quantum mechanics.