People Biography

Dr. Ferda Ofli is a Principal Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Before joining QCRI, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, from 2010 to 2014. He received BSc degrees both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering, and a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2005 and 2010, respectively.

Dr. Ofli's research interests span computer vision, machine learning, remote sensing, and multimedia signal processing. In recent years, his work has focused on applying deep learning techniques to image data from diverse sources, including the Internet, UAVs, and satellites, to enhance object recognition and scene understanding in real-world conditions. His research is particularly driven by applications in the social good domain, including disaster response, crisis management, and sustainable development. To tackle the challenges posed by real-world distribution shifts, he leverages domain adaptation, domain generalization, open-set/open-world recognition, and zero-shot and few-shot learning techniques.

Dr. Ofli is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, with over 80 publications in top-tier conferences and journals, including CVPR, ECCV, WWW, AAAI, IJCV, and PAMI. His contributions have been recognized with several awards, including the AAAI Deployed Application Award (2024), Best Paper Awards at ISCRAM (2019–2020), the Elsevier JVCI Best Paper Award (2015), and the IEEE SIU Best Student Paper Award (2011). He has also received multiple Outstanding Reviewer Awards from CVPR (2020, 2021, 2025) and SIU (2023). Beyond academia, his work has been featured in the BBC, New Scientist, Wired, and other mainstream media outlets.