I am a Tenured Full Professor at the Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. From 2013 to 2023, I was a Research Associate Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Director and Distinguished Principal Scientist with Information Sciences Institute, both are units of USC Viterbi School of Engineering. I am the Founding Director of the USC’s Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory (VIMAL). I received my B.S. in electrical engineering in 1994 and my M.S. in computer engineering in 1997 from Mansoura University in Egypt. I earned a graduate software engineering diploma in 1997 from the Information Technology Institute in Egypt via a scholarship granted to distinguished graduates from Egyptian universities. I obtained my Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2003 where I was also awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student award. my research interests include representation learning, debiasing and fair representations, multimedia forensics and visual misinformation identification (such as deepfake and image manipulation detection) and face recognition and biometric anti-spoofing. I lead several multi-institution research efforts, including DARPA’s MediFor, GARD and LwLL and IARPA’s Janus, Odin and BRIAR. I have over 100 publications in top computer vision, machine learning and biometrics conferences and journals, including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, ECCV, ACM MM, PAMI, TBIOM and ICB. I am the recipient of 2022 and 2019 USC Information Sciences Institute Achievement Award. My research has also been featured in Forbes, Glamour UK, Fox News, Time For Kids and PCMag.
My full Vita can be found here.
My name is expressed as /waʔill/ using the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you are interested in pronouncing my name properly, please listen to this.