Motaz Ahmad El-Saban is a senior applied researcher at Microsoft Research Advanced Technology Labs in Cairo (ATL Cairo). He has over 18 years of experience in machine learning and data science, especially in computer vision, image processing, and speech processing. He has worked on projects involving web ranking, social network analysis, object recognition, video processing, and deep learning. He has authored several patents and publications in these areas.

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Personal Information
Motaz Ahmad El-Saban
Microsoft Research Advanced Technology Labs in Cairo (ATL Cairo)
Mobile number: +20 122 796 7966
Work Email: motazel@microsoft.com
Personal Email: motaz.elsaban@gmail.com
Website: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/motazel/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/motazelsaban
Profile
Experienced applied scientist and manager in the fields of machine learning and data
sciences in the domains of computer vision, image processing, speech processing and
information retrieval; with more than eighteen years of experience in producing product
and services technology transfers, product shipping, research publications and patents. I
worked on technical areas such as web rankers, social network analysis, object and scene
recognition, panoramic video construction, speaker recognition and deep neural networks.
I specially enjoy extracting insights and trends from large datasets using statistical tools
and machine learning (regression, classification and clustering). Throughout my
professional career I acquired skills as both individual contributor and manager for
researchers and software developers.
Professional Experience
1. Senior applied researcher in ATL Cairo (December 2011 – now)
a. Conduct applied research and implement technologies resulting in technology
transfers, demos, patents and publications
b. Lead collaborations with several MSR labs such as MSRA, MSRC and MSRR
resulting in joint publications and patents
2. Group manager for the image and video understanding group in ATL Cairo (December
2011 – May 2013) and (July 2014 – September 2015)
a. Responsible for setting the technical roadmap for the team to deliver technology
transfers for MS product teams, shipping products and services and generate IP
in areas of:
i. Object detection, segmentation and matching
ii. Face recognition and authentication
iii. Video tagging
iv. Story generation from user photos
v. Speaker recognition
vi. Video panorama generation
vii. Sensor fusion of image, G-sensor and compass information
viii. Special focus on multimedia on mobile devices (sample work: real-time
panoramic video construction (featured in BBC, New Scientist
magazine, TechRadar, MicroBlogBuzz, OSFeeds, Microsoft.com

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website, msdn channel 9, arstechnica, createdigitalmotion, thenextblog)
and real-time video annotation (thinkweek paper 2010)
ix. Scanned document image search
b. Responsible for selecting projects with high impact
c. Responsible for hiring and managing the group members including developers,
research assistants and postdocs
3. Research manager for the ATL Cairo (April 2011 – December 2011) and (May 2013
– July 2014)
a. Responsible for hiring, managing and evaluating the team members including
researchers, research assistants and postdocs
b. Setting and approving the applied research vision and roadmap for the lab
a. Budget management for the research team
4. Associate professor (on leave), Cairo University Faculty of Computers and Information
(April 2014 – now)
 Teaching undergraduate and graduate courses such as multimedia processing,
pattern recognition, computer organization and virtual reality
 Supervising graduation projects and master thesis
5. Research scientist then software engineer for NevenVision (Google acquired it soon
after I joined in), Santa Monica (Mar 2006-Sep 2006)
- Conducting applied research and development of visual object recognition for 2D
planar objects such as CD & book covers
6. Scientist at El-ALAMIA for electrical products (IEP), R&D section (Sept. 1999 – Aug.
2000)
- Implementation of the video compression part (H.263 standard implemented for the
Philips Trimedia DSP processor TM1100 for real-time operation written in C
language) of the videophone product.
Technology Transfers & Products Shipping
1. Shipping image Azure intelligent services for build 2015 event under Project
Oxford (I led one of the contributing teams)
2. Document/Whiteboard Video real-time scene classifier for OfficeLens app on
Windows Phone. Classifier had to meet stringent processing time and memory
constraints
3. Photo utility classifier for Microsoft Camera team to use across devices (Nokia
team)
4. 3D Lego figure recognition for Xbox using point fetaures
5. People detection in images for bing maps for privacy reasons
6. People tagging in images for bing multimedia indexgen quality team
7. People tagging in images for bing multimedia image understanding team
8. Bing ShopEX V2 visual product search for clothes with improvements including
utilizing skin removal for more accurate matching
9. Image matching for automated UI verification tests

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10. Improved machine learning ranker for commerce intent Web queries
Patents
1. Waleed Magdi and Motaz El-Saban, Personalized notification of live events (U.S.
patent #8,881,191)
2. Waleed Magdi and Motaz El-Saban, Using An Id Domain To Improve Searching
(U.S. granted patent #8,131,720 and #8,538,964 (continuation))
3. Heba Ashour, Nayer Wanas, Mostafa El Baradei and Motaz El-Saban, User
Evaluation in a Collaborative Online Forum (U.S. patent #8,893,024)
4. Ayman Kaheel, Motaz El-Saban, Mohamed Shawky and Mahmoud Refaat,
Sharing video data associated with the same event (U.S. patent #8,767,081)
5. Motaz El-Saban, Christopher Burges and Qiang Wu, Re-ranking top search results
(U.S. patent #8,661,030)
6. Motaz El-Saban, Ayman Kaheel, Mahmoud Refaat and Ahmad Abd El Hameed,
Composite video generation (U.S. patent #8,605,783)
7. Ayman Kaheel, Motaz El-Saban, Mahmoud Refaat, Ahmad El Arabawy, Mostafa
Baradei Using accelerometer information for determining orientation of pictures
and video images (U.S. patent pending)
8. Motaz El-Saban, Xin-Jing Wang and May Sayed, Real-Time Annotation And
Enrichment Of Captured Video (U.S. patent #8,903,798)
9. James Lau, Ayman Kaheel, Motaz El-Saban Mohammad Shawky, Monica
Gonzales, Ahmed El Baz, Tamer Deif and Alaa Abd El Hakeem, Using facial data
for device authentication or subject identification (U.S. patent pending)
10. Motaz El-Saban, Ayman Kaheel, Mohammad Shawky and James Lau, Modifying
video regions using mobile device input (U.S. patent pending)
11. Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton and Motaz El Saban, Synthesizing Training
Samples for Object Recognition (U.S. patent #8,903,167)
12. Alaa Abd El Hakeem and Motaz El-Saban, Dynamic update of recovered subspaces
of high dimensional
13. Motaz et al, Natural language search of images and navigation
Honors, Awards and Recognition
1. [Microsoft] Sep 2015 - Outstanding summer interns mentor (3rd
place)
2. The paper “Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild Using Rich Deep Features”
selected as one of the top 10% papers in ICIP 2015.
3. [Microsoft] May 2015 – One-time Special Stock Award
4. [Microsoft] Sep 2011 - Outstanding summer interns mentor (1st
place)
5. [Microsoft] Mar 2011 – certificate of achievement for thinkweek paper contribution
6. [Microsoft] Jan 2011 - TechTransfer award for Win UI validation through image
matching
7. [Microsoft] Sep 2009 - Outstanding summer interns mentor (1st
place)
8. [Microsoft] July 2009 - Gold Star Stock Award

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9. [Microsoft] November 2008- Ship-It award for the work done on web ranking with
the “Live” search (commerce vertical) product group
10. [UCSB] September 2000- December 2005, Full financial support throughout Ph.D.
study at University of California Santa Barbara ($13000/year)
11. [UCSB] May 2005, Awarded the Electrical and Computer Engineering department
fellowship at the University of California Santa Barbara ($5000)
12. [IBM] September 2003, IBM student research support for attending the
International Conference of Image Processing (ICIP) 2003 ($1000)
13. [Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering] September 1992 – August 1997,
Awarded the Cairo University faculty of engineering undergraduate scholarship
Programming and Scripting Languages
- C, C++, C#, C under Windows (API programming), Visual Basic, Visual C++
(MFC), Visual C#, JAVA, Python, Matlab, R and CUDA (basic knowledge)
- Extensive experience with computer vision, image processing and general signal
processing libraries such as OpenCV, ImageMagick and FFTW
- Experience in both sequential and parallel programming (over HPC and GPU
clusters)
Invited Talks, Presentations and Demonstrations
 Presented “Stitching videos streamed by mobile phones in real-time“, ACM-MM
09 (technical demonstration)
 Presented at Microsoft TechFest 2010 “MoviBing: real-time search on mobile
phones using captured video”
 Presented at Microsoft TechFest 2009 “Searching scanned books without the need
for OCR: OCRLess” (selected also for the public day, read this MS internal article
on msw, and on Microsoft community research)
 Presented at Microsoft TechFest 2009 “Real-Time Stitching of Mobile-Generated
Videos” (selected also for the public day, got much press coverage as in BBC, New
Scientist magazine, TechRadar, MicroBlogBuzz, OSFeeds, Microsoft.com
website, msdn channel 9, arstechnica, createdigitalmotion, thenextblog)
 Invited talk in the computer vision summit in Microsoft research (March 2014) on
“semantic segmentation for scene recognition”
 Invited talk in the image search summit in Microsoft research (March 2013 & 2014)
on “using GPS derived features for scene recognition”
 Invited talk in the OSD (online services division) privacy summit for bing on
“visual object detection for privacy purposes in bing street images”, May 2012
 Invited talk at the Cairo University Faculty of Computers and Information Machine
learning and computer vision workshop, “Probabilistic graphical models in
computer vision”, May 2012.
 Invited talk for the Microsoft Bing Knowledge Web (KW) incubation group, Nov
2011.

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 Invited talk at the yearly Microsoft Research Cambridge TAB (technical advisory
board) meeting 2011.
 Invited talk about my current research work in object recognition and computer
vision in the MSR Interactive Visual Media group, Mar 2011.
 Invited talk about my recent research “Novel multimedia experiences for mobile
devices” in KAUST (May 2010)
 Invited talk in Microsoft Research Redmond (Text Mining and search navigation
group, on CMIC activities (scanned document processing and information
retrieval), Aug 2008
 Invited talk in Microsoft Research Asia on MM activities (stitching, annotation,
scanned document processing and ranking), Oct 2009 (recording available here
(MSR internal link))
Professional Activities and Services
 Board member of a Microsoft research wide committee on issues in patent
detectability
 Reviewer for the Microsoft Research Award in the “Multimedia, Graphics, and
Computer Vision” track 2013
 Session chair in ICPR 2012 and ICIP 2009
 Reviewer for TIEC (Technology Innovation and entrepreneurship center) proposals
for startups in Egypt.
 Reviewer for 2012 IBTIECAR graduation projects competition in Egypt.
 Reviewer for international conferences and journals such as the international
conference in computer vision (ICCV 2013), ACM Transactions on Intelligent
Systems and Technology (ACM-TIST), (ACM-TOIS), International Conference on
Embedded and Multimedia Computing), ICPR 2010, international journal of
computer vision 2010, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing,
Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP), IEEE international conference
on image processing (ICIP) 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014, IEEE
Transactions on Circuits and systems for video technology (CSVT) and Elsevier
Image and Vision Computing journal
Education & Professional Training
University of California Santa Barbara1
, Santa Barbara, California USA
(September 2000 – March 2006)
 Ph.D. Electrical and computer engineering department, March 2006. GPA: 4.0.
Dissertation title: “Automated microtubule tracking and analysis” under the
supervision of Professor B. S. Manjunath. The dissertation was among one of the
earliest attempts to automatically track and model microtubules which are sub-
cellular structures vital in many body functions including cell division.
1
UCSB ranked 32 among universities worldwide according to the Academic Ranking of World
Universities (ARWU) as of the ranking of 2010. The ECE department is ranked in the top 5 ECE
departments in the NCR rankings.

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 M.Sc. Electrical and computer engineering department with major in digital signal
processing, June 2004.
Cairo University, Giza, EGYPT (September 1992 – August 2000)
 M.Eng., Electronics and Communication, (August 2000)
Dissertation title: “Very low bit rate video coding using the H.263 standard and
vector quantization”. Grade: Distinction.
 B.Sc., Electronics and Communication, (August 1997)
Grade: Distinction with honors, ranked 5th over a department with 180 students.
Professional Training
 Situational leadership, Interviewing at Microsoft, Effective presentations at
Microsoft, Business conduct and ethics at Microsoft, Managing collaboration and
Impact at Microsoft, Innovation strategy workshop, Strategic planning, Technical
conferences organization, Managing research teams and Effective presentation