Xiaoming Liu, professor of computer science and engineering, has been named an MSU Foundation Professor, a designation given to outstanding faculty who demonstrate excellence in research.
Liu joins around 50 of his peers who have previously been named MSU Foundation Professors.
MSU Foundation Professor Xiaoming Liu
“MSU Foundation Professors are internationally recognized researchers,” said David Washburn, executive director of the Michigan State University Foundation. “Their scholarship and contributions to their fields represent a level of engagement and accomplishment that the foundation is proud to support.”
Liu is an internationally recognized expert of computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and deep learning. He is the director of the MSU Computer Vision Lab, where his goal is to enable computers to have human-level intelligence through the use of cameras to see and understand the world.
His research ranges from human faces and bodies, to urban scenes, plants, and medical imaging. Recent interests also include 3D perception in autonomous driving and defending against various digital image manipulations, such as deepfake. He has been issued more than 20 patents for his work.
Engineering Dean Leo Kempel said Liu is a global expert in computer vision, a critical underlying technology for mobility systems and other emerging new products designed to make our lives better.
“He is a scholar who brings not only his expertise but practical knowledge from industry. I am very pleased that he has joined the ranks of MSU Foundation Professors,” Kempel added.
Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian, chairperson of the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said Liu is one of the most prominent researchers in the global computer vision community.
“During the past 20 years, Xiaoming has developed a number of innovative and practical solutions to face recognition, constructing 3D face models from 2D images, face anti-spoofing, and real-time pedestrian detection for autonomous vehicles,” Esfahanian said. “His external research projects, presentations, and publications (h-index of 55 and over 10,000 citations) bring significant recognition to MSU, especially in the highly competitive field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).”
Overall, MSU is ranked #13 in the computer vision area among U.S. institutions, according to CSRankings.
Liu is a seasoned area chair for many top-tier AI conferences, including IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Europe Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
He was the program chair of IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2018, IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) 2018. He will be the program chair for IEEE Advanced Video and Signal-based Surveillance conference (AVSS) 2022, and general chair for IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) 2023. In addition, Liu serves as the associate editor of several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Pattern Recognition Letters.
Among Liu’s awards and honors, he was elected a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) in 2020 – an honor that recognizes only a select 0.25 percent of the members. In 2018, he received the College of Engineering Distinguished Scholar – Junior Award for demonstrated excellence in scholarship.
He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004; a master’s degree in computer science at Zhejiang University in China in 2000; and a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Beijing Information Technology Institute in China in 1997. Prior to joining MSU in August 2012, he was a research scientist at the Computer Vision Laboratory of GE Global Research.
The MSU Foundation Professorship was established in 2014 by the Michigan State University Foundation. The title is awarded to individuals who combine externally recognized, exemplary scholarly accomplishment and potential with clear professional relevance to specific areas of MSU scholarly need, disciplinary development, or research or creative emphasis. View the full roster of MSU Foundation Professors by visiting the Office of Research & Innovation website.
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