PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Khurram Soomro

Khurram Soomro is a computer vision researcher who created UCF101 with Amir Roshan Zamir and Mubarak Shah at the University of Central Florida in 2012, a dataset of 13,320 YouTube videos in 101 human action categories. His doctoral work under Shah focused on action localization, with a context walk method at ICCV 2015, online prediction at CVPR 2016 and an unsupervised approach at ICCV 2017, and he completed his computer science PhD in 2017. At ECCV 2022, he, Zamir and Shah shared the Everingham Prize with the team behind the HMDB51 action dataset. He works at CHEP as Director of Machine Learning, AI and Strategic Initiatives and is a named inventor on a camera-based pallet inspection patent granted in 2025.

Now at
CHEP
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2012

    The UCF101 action dataset

    In 2012, he releases UCF101 with Amir Roshan Zamir and Mubarak Shah at the University of Central Florida's Center for Research in Computer Vision, as technical report CRCV-TR-12-01. The dataset holds 13,320 realistic YouTube videos from 101 action categories, about 27 hours of video, and extends the earlier UCF50 set.

  2. 2015

    Context walk at ICCV

    With Haroon Idrees and Mubarak Shah, he presents "Action Localization in Videos Through Context Walk" at ICCV 2015. The method splits videos into supervoxels and learns their relative displacements to foreground actions, which cuts the number of classifier evaluations compared with sliding-window search.

  3. 2016

    Online action localization at CVPR

    At CVPR 2016, he, Idrees and Shah present a method that predicts actions and their locations while a video plays, using poses and superpixels from only a few frames at each moment. He tells CVPR Daily that the team is the first to predict and localize an action as the video is being viewed.

  4. 2017

    A PhD on action localization

    He completes a PhD in computer science at the University of Central Florida in 2017 under Mubarak Shah, with the dissertation "Online, Supervised and Unsupervised Action Localization in Videos", which combines context-based, online and unsupervised localization. At ICCV 2017, he and Shah present an unsupervised method that discovers action classes in unlabeled videos and localizes the actions in space and time.

  5. 2019

    Action prediction in TPAMI

    In 2019, he publishes "Online Localization and Prediction of Actions and Interactions" with Haroon Idrees and Mubarak Shah in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, a person-centric approach to localizing and predicting actions and interactions in videos.

  6. 2022

    The Everingham Prize

    At ECCV 2022, he, Amir Roshan Zamir and Mubarak Shah, as the UCF101 dataset team, share the Everingham Prize with the HMDB51 dataset team of Hilde Kuehne, Hueihan Jhuang, Estibaliz Garrote, Tomaso A. Poggio and Thomas Serre.

  7. October 2022–October 2025

    A pallet inspection patent

    In October 2022, he and four co-inventors file a US patent application, assigned to CHEP, for a pallet inspection system in which cameras photograph pallets on a conveyor, one algorithm tags images that show support blocks and a second detects nails with exposed tips. The patent, US 12,444,035 B2, is granted in October 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    Machine learning director at CHEP

    Since April 2018, he works at CHEP, where he serves as Director of Machine Learning, AI and Strategic Initiatives.

Career

  1. Since 2018CHEPDirector of Machine Learning, AI and Strategic Initiatives

Education

  1. 2017University of Central FloridaPhD

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Central Florida. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Central Florida. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of Central Florida. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Khurram Soomro yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. [1212.0402] UCF101: A Dataset of 101 Human Actions Classes From Videos in The Wild arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. UCF101 – Action Recognition Data Set – Center for Research in Computer Vision crcv.ucf.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Action Localization in Videos Through Context Walk – ICCV 2015 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Predicting the Where and What of Actors and Actions Through Online Action Localization – CVPR 2016 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Daily CVPR - Wednesday rsipvision.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. "Online, Supervised and Unsupervised Action Localization in Videos" by Khurram Soomro stars.library.ucf.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Unsupervised Action Discovery and Localization in Videos – ICCV 2017 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Online Localization and Prediction of Actions and Interactions ojp.gov. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. ECVA | European Computer Vision Association ecva.net. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. US12444035B2 - Pallet inspection system and associated methods - Google Patents patents.google.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  11. Khurram Soomro - Director Of Machine Learning, AI And Strategic Initiatives at CHEP theorg.com. Checked 20 October 2026.