Roles and responsibilities
- Provide help and guidance in matter of implementing different architecture of vision systems for the need of the concerned NRC teams.
- Contribution to the advancement of research related to my expertise especially using unsupervised learning techniques in depth related vision systems.
- Act, when necessary, as a technical reviewer in my field within NRC related organizations and academia including conferences and Journals.
Current research and/or projects
- Development of learning SLAM systems from monocular or stereo videos sequences.
- 3D human gaze tracking from event cameras.
- SLAM integration in a drone-based system for many applications such as bridges inspection, exploration of unknown territory, traffic monitoring, etc...
Research and/or project statements
Talented researcher with a demonstrated history of working in both academia and industry research. Skilled in building real-time 3D vision systems for broad AI systems. My actual focus is the use of different elements of depth sensing to help learning intelligent systems such as autonomous flying vehicles, 3D inspection, robotics, augmented reality systems, etc.. I am also exploring new aspects of integration of vision systems with HCI systems to expand human capabilities when human vision sensing is not efficient.
Education
Ph.D. in Telecommunications, 2005 (completed in less than 3 years)
Institut National de Recherche Scientifique, Montreal, QC
M.Sc. in Telecommunications, 2003
Institut National de Recherche Scientifique, Montreal, QC
B.Sc. Honours in Physics, 1994
University Mohammed V, Morocco
Professional activities/interests
1. Teaching Activities
- INF8225 Artificial intelligence, Polytechnique Montreal, 2012. (Partial)
2. Reviewer in Academia
I have served as a reviewer for the following research conference and journal:
- International Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV)
- IEEE Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
- The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC).
- International Conference on 3DVision (3DV).
3. Reviewer in Canadian Organizations
- Often, I am doing reviews for IRAP
- I also served as a technical reviewer for ISED.
4. Society Memberships
- Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (2006-2016)
Awards
- Best Paper Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2007
- Doctoral Postgraduate Scholarship (Competitive), Institut National de Recherche Scientifique, Montreal, 2003-2005
- Doctoral Graduation Award, Ministry of Education of Quebec, 2005.
- Master Postgraduate Scholarship (Competitive), Institut National de Recherche Scientifique, Montreal, 2001-2003
Inventions and patents
Key publications
Previous work experience
Postdoctoral Researcher, 03-2015 to 03-2016
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON
Dept. of Systems Design Engineering
Responsible for technical and supervisory aspects of industry-sponsored research projects with Christie Digital Systems. I was providing both research and implementation guidance to improve the following projects:
Project 1: Spatio-Temporal Resolution Enhancement for High Frame Rate Display.
Project 2: Improve projection mapping on 3D surface.
Project 3: Analysis of 3D volume representation of 2D depth stack digital pathology images.
Project 4: Super-pixel approach for background estimation.
Project 5: HDR vision-based system for welding applications.
Computer Vision Researcher, 08-2012 to 02-2015
Ubisoft, Montreal, QC
Principal investigator to build 4D performance-driven based facial animation system for next generation game engines.
Research Associate, 05-2012 to 08-2012
Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC
Dep. de Genie Informatique et Genie Logiciel
Investigate and develop highly accurate tracking system for facial expression. This project was industry-sponsored research by Ubisoft to improve their facial-based motion capture system.
Postdoctoral Associate, 05-2011 to 04-2012
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Project 1: Background subtraction using geodesic active contours in ICA subspace for video surveillance applications
Project 2: Framework for natural landmark-based robot localization
Project 3: Automatic license plate recognition system (ALPR)
Specialist in Vision Systems and Technical Director, 09-2007 to 02-2011
SPG-DATA 3D, Sainte-Julie, QC
Designed and developed a 3D scanner based on structured light to infer dense 3D cloud of points for highly accurate 3D measurements (20um accuracy). I was also responsible for the technical and supervisory aspects of the project with a team of 1 technician, 1 software developer, and 3 engineers.
Postdoctoral Fellow, 09-2005 to 03-2007
University of Miami, Miami, FL
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Project 1: Integrated high-precision opti-acoustic imaging and positioning platform for underwater search and inspection.
Project 2: Investigation of structure from motion techniques for forward-scan sonar imagery.
Additional links
www.linkedin.com/in/sekkati