Ali Athar
Applied Scientist
Amazon
Biography
I work as an Applied Scientist at Amazon Frontier AI and Robotics (FAR) and am based out of Berlin, Germany. Previously, I worked as a Research Scientist at ByteDance Seed. I completed my PhD in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen University (Germany) under the supervision of Prof. Bastian Leibe. My research interests include video understanding, spatial intelligence, and object tracking and segmentation.
Interests
- Computer Vision
- Video Understanding
- Object Tracking and Segmentation
Education
PhD in Computer Science, 2019 - 2024
RWTH Aachen University (Aachen, Germany)
MSc. in Communications Engineering, 2016 - 2019
Technical University of Munich (Germany)
BE in Electrical Engineering, 2012 - 2016
National University of Sciences and Technology (Islamabad, Pakistan)
Publications
(2025).
ViCaS: A Dataset for Combining Holistic and Pixel-level Video Understanding using Captions with Grounded Segmentation.
In CVPR.
(2024).
Multimodal Four-dimensional Panoptic Segmentation.
In US Patent App. 18/736,525.
(2023).
4D-Former: Multimodal 4D Panoptic Segmentation.
In CoRL.
(2023).
TarViS: A Unified Approach for Target-based Video Segmentation.
In CVPR (Highlight).
(2023).
BURST: A Benchmark for Unifying Object Recognition, Segmentation and Tracking in Video.
In WACV.
(2022).
HODOR: High-level Object Descriptors for Object Re-segmentation in Video Learned from Static Images.
In CVPR (Oral).
(2022).
Differentiable Soft-Masked Attention.
In CVPR-W.
(2021).
A Single-Stage, Bottom-up Approach for Occluded VIS using Spatio-temporal Embeddings.
In ICCV-W.
(2020).
Making a Case for 3D Convolutions for Object Segmentation in Videos.
In BMVC.
(2020).
STEm-Seg: Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos.
In ECCV.
(2019).
Whole-body motion and footstep planning for humanoid robots with multi-heuristic search.
Robotics and Autonomous Systems.
(2016).
Whole-body motion planning for humanoid robots with heuristic search.
In IROS.
Experience
Applied Scientist
Amazon FAR
Research Scientist
ByteDance Inc.
Research Intern
Conference Reviewer
ICRA 2019, BMVC 2020, CVPR 2021, ICCV 2021, BMVC 2021, CVPR 2022, ECCV 2022, CVIU
Teaching Assistant
RWTH Aachen
Machine Learning (Winter 2019 and Winter 2020), Computer Vision (Winter 2021)
Working Student 3D Robotics and Perception
Worked as a part-time software engineer and for some time as a research intern. Areas of work included 3D mapping, projection geometry, image and point-cloud manipulation.
Languages/APIs: C++, Python, ROS, OpenCV
Awards and Scholarships
Outstanding Reviewer Award
Wrote Exemplary reviews for manuscripts submitted to CVPR 2022.
High Distinction
Completed master’s degree with CGPA of 1.2/5.0 on German scale (~3.8/4.0 on US scale)
Chancellor’s Silver Medal
Completed bachelor’s degree with second-highest CGPA in graduating class (3.93/4.0)
Excellence Scholarship
Partial tuition fee waiver on acccount of >3.6 CGPA throughout all semesters of bachelor’s degree