KAUST's Visual Computing Center (VCC) hosted an Open House event on March 28, showcasing its interdisciplinary research in visual computing. Demonstrations included a virtual reality driving simulator by FalconViz, intended for driver education in Saudi Arabia. Researchers also presented a drone trained to autonomously navigate race courses and a neural network for autonomous driving using image-based technology without GPS. Why it matters: The VCC's work highlights KAUST's role in advancing visual computing applications relevant to Saudi Arabia, from driver training to autonomous systems.
KAUST's Visual Computing Center had two papers recognized at IEEE VIS 2023. One paper, from Prof. Markus Hadwiger's group, introduced a new method for detecting and visualizing vortex structures in 2D fluid flows, which was recognized as one of the best papers. The second paper, from Prof. Ivan Viola's team, presented Dr. KID, a visualization framework for physicalizing biological structures into 3D-printed models, receiving an honorable mention. Why it matters: These awards highlight KAUST's contributions to cutting-edge visualization techniques with potential applications in diverse scientific and engineering fields.
Researchers at MBZUAI introduce "Interactive Video Reasoning," a new paradigm enabling models to actively "think with videos" by performing iterative visual actions to gather and refine evidence. They developed Video CoM, which reasons through a Chain of Manipulations (CoM), and constructed Video CoM Instruct, an 18K instruction tuning dataset for multi-step manipulation reasoning. The model is further optimized via reinforcement learning with reasoning aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), achieving strong results across nine video reasoning benchmarks.
A new benchmark, ViMUL-Bench, is introduced to evaluate video LLMs across 14 languages, including Arabic, with a focus on cultural inclusivity. The benchmark includes 8k manually verified samples across 15 categories and varying video durations. A multilingual video LLM, ViMUL, is also presented, along with a training set of 1.2 million samples, with both to be publicly released.
KAUST Professor Boon Ooi, Nobel laureate Shuji Nakamura, and colleagues are collaborating on laser-based solid state lighting (SSL) and visible light communications (VLC). The team is using gallium nitride (GaN) to develop high-performance semiconductor laser devices, leveraging nanofabrication techniques at KAUST. They demonstrated that their laser-based VLC system is over 20 times faster than LED-based Li-Fi systems. Why it matters: This research could enable faster, more energy-efficient data transmission using visible light, with potential applications in both terrestrial and underwater communication.