PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

George Awad

George Awad is a NIST computer scientist who leads evaluation of video retrieval and understanding. He holds a PhD in Computing from Dublin City University and has supported NIST's TRECVID project since 2007. His career includes NIST guest research and contract work, a Georgetown assistant research professorship from 2019 to 2022, and a NIST computer-scientist role from 2022. He coauthored a 2016 retrospective on TRECVid's Semantic Indexing task and a 2023 overview of TRECVID's 2022 evaluation. He shared the 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize for TRECVID's video retrieval datasets and workshops, and as of October 2026 he is a Computer Scientist and Project Leader in NIST's Multimedia Language Technologies Group.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    Supporting TRECVID at NIST

    He begins supporting NIST's TRECVID project in 2007. He holds a PhD in Computing from Dublin City University.

  2. 2007–2012

    Guest researcher at NIST

    He serves as a guest researcher in NIST's Information Retrieval Group from 2007 to 2012. His work supports TRECVID's evaluation of video search using real-world datasets.

  3. 2012–2019

    Contractor at NIST

    He works as a contractor for Dakota Consulting in NIST's Information Retrieval Group from 2012 to 2019.

  4. 2016

    Semantic indexing at TRECVid

    In a 2016 paper, he and three coauthors review TRECVid's Semantic Indexing task, which runs from 2010 to 2015 and evaluates systems for detecting visual, auditory or multimodal concepts in video.

  5. 2018

    PAMI Mark Everingham Prize

    He shares the 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize with Alan Smeaton, Wessel Kraaij and Paul Over for TRECVID's video retrieval datasets and workshops.

  6. 2019–2022

    Assistant research professor at Georgetown

    He serves as an Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University from 2019 to 2022 while affiliated with NIST's Information Retrieval Group.

  7. 2023

    A TRECVID 2022 overview

    In a 2023 paper, he and coauthors summarize TRECVID's 2022 evaluation across six tasks, including video search, video-to-text captioning, activity detection, deep video understanding and movie summarization.

  8. As of October 2026

    Computer scientist and project leader

    He has worked as a Computer Scientist in NIST's Information Retrieval Group since 2022. As of October 2026, he is a Computer Scientist and Project Leader in NIST's Multimedia Language Technologies Group and leads TRECVID's evaluation program for video retrieval and understanding.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. George Awad | NIST nist.gov. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. [Invited Paper] TRECVid Semantic Indexing of Video: A 6-Year Retrospective jstage.jst.go.jp. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. George Awad Received the 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize | NIST nist.gov. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Alan Smeaton jointly wins the IEEE Computer Society Mark Everingham prize | Dublin City University dcu.ie. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. An overview on the evaluated video retrieval tasks at TRECVID 2022 arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Our Staff | NIST nist.gov. Checked 19 October 2026.