Work & Research

Work Interests:

My professional experience is focused on applied deep learning for solving real-world problems. Our team is working on ParkNet: a deep learning-based parking spot detector. Here’s a short video of our work:

 

Prior to falling in love with DNNs, my professional experience was focused on applications of 3D computer vision and multi-view geometry in solving problems such as camera localization, stereo vision and geometry acquisition. Our team took great strides towards reliable localization of a single camera to high definition (HD) maps for autonomous vehicles. Here’s a short video of our work:

 

I enjoy coding in C++ and Python. I use both languages on a daily basis for writing production code for safety-critical and resource constrained systems (read: self-driving cars!). I also have extensive prior work experience with C# and Java. 

Research Interests:

My primary research interests lie in human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer vision. My PhD dissertation is focused on intuitive, yet fast and efficient recurrent neural networks (RNN) for gesture recognition, as well as generative adversarial networks (GANs) for synthetic gesture generation.

Previously, my research at UCF was focused on leveraging sketch-based interfaces to support various robotic manipulation tasks. Our goal was to explore how sketch-based interfaces could be used to assist robots through geometry extraction, behavior modification, and guided autonomy. This research was supported by NSF Award IIS-1638060.

Education:

  • (2020) Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL, USA)
  • (2017) Master of Science in Computer Science (MS along the way), University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL, USA)
  • (2014) Master of Science in Computer Science, Brock University (St. Catharines, ON, Canada)
  • (2011) Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering, Sheikhbahaee University (Esfahan, Esfahan, Iran)

Professional Experience:

  • (Since 2023)  Senior Deep Learning Developer Advocate (Generative AI), NVIDIA Corporation
  • (2020-2023)  Senior Deep Learning Engineer (Visual Perception), NVIDIA Corporation
  • (2017-2020)  Senior DriveWorks Computer Vision Engineer, NVIDIA Corporation
  • (2016)  Computer Vision Developer Technology Intern, NVIDIA Corporation

Patents:

  • (2023) M. Park, T. Pham, J. Kwon, M. Sajjadi, B. Chen, X. Liu, B. Jujjavarapu, M. Maghoumi, “Surround scene perception using multiple sensors for autonomous systems and applications”, US Patent App. 18/353,453
  • (2018) Eugene M. Taranta II, Mehran Maghoumi, Corey R. Pittman, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “Synthetic Data Generation of Time Series Data”, US Patent 10,133,949

Publications:

  • (2024) T. Pham, M. Maghoumi, W. Jiang, B. Jujjavarapu, M. Sajjadi X. Liu, H. Lin, B. Chen, G. Truong, C. Fang, J. Kwon, M. Park “NVAutoNet: Fast and Accurate 360∘ 3D Perception For Self Driving“, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2024)
    [PDF] [Video]
  • (2021) Mehran Maghoumi, Eugene M. Taranta II, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “DeepNAG: Deep Non-Adversarial Gesture Generation“, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2021) (Acceptance rate: 25.0%)
    Recipient of IUI 2021 Honorable Mention Award
    [PDF] [Project Page] [Code]
  • (2021)  A. Caputo, A. Giachetti, S. Soso, D. Pintani, A. D’Eusanio, S. Pini, G. Borghi, A. Simoni, R. Vezzani, R. Cucchiara, A. Ranieri, F. Giannini, K. Lupinetti, M. Monti, M. Maghoumi and J.J. LaViola, M. Le, H. Nguyen, M. Tran “SHREC 2021: Skeleton-based Hand Gesture Recognition in the Wild“, Computers & Graphics.
    [PDF]
  • (2020) Eugene M. Taranta II, Corey R. Pittman, Mehran Maghoumi, Mykola Maslych, Yasmine M. Moolenaar, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “Machete: Easy, Efficient, and Precise Continuous Custom Gesture Segmentation“, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
    [PDF]
  • (2020) Eugene M. Taranta II, Corey R. Pittman, Jack Oakley, Mykola Maslych, Mehran Maghoumi, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “Moving Toward an Ecologically Valid Data Collection Protocol for 2D Gestures In Video Games“, Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020). (Acceptance rate: 24.3%)
    [PDF]
  • (2019) Fabio Marco Caputo, S Burato, G Pavan, T Voillemin, Hazem Wannous, Jean-Philippe Vandeborre, Mehran Maghoumi, EM Taranta, A Razmjoo, JJ LaViola Jr, F Manganaro, S Pini, G Borghi, R Vezzani, R Cucchiara, H Nguyen, MT Tran, A Giachetti. “SHREC 2019 Track: Online Gesture Recognition“, 12th Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval (3DODR 2019)
    Winner of the SHREC 2019 Challenge on Online Gesture Recognition
    [PDF]
  • (2019) Mehran Maghoumi, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “DeepGRU: Deep Gesture Recognition Utility“, Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC 2019)
    [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
  • (2018) Mehran Maghoumi, Joseph J. LaViola Jr., Karthik Desingh, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins. “GemSketch: Interactive Image-Guided Geometry Extraction from Point Clouds“,  Proceedings of 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018).
    [PDF] [Supplementary] [Video]
  • (2017) Pooya Khaloo, Mehran Maghoumi, Eugene M. Taranta II, David Bettner, Joseph J. Laviola Jr. “Code Park: A New 3D Code Visualization Tool“, 2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (IEEE VISSOFT 2017).
    [PDF] [Video]
  • (2017) Eugene M. Taranta II, Amirreza Samiei, Mehran Maghoumi, Pooya Khaloo, Corey R. Pittman, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “Jackknife: A Reliable Recognizer with Few Samples and Many Modalities“, Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017).  (Acceptance rate: 25.0%)
    Recipient of SIGCHI Best of CHI Honorable Mention Award (top 5%)
    [PDF] [Project Page] [Code]
  • (2016) Eugene M. Taranta II, Mehran Maghoumi, Corey Pittman, Joseph J. LaViola Jr. “A Rapid Prototyping Approach to Synthetic Data Generation For Improved 2D Gesture Recognition“, Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2016)(Acceptance rate: 20.6%)
    [PDF] [Demo Video] [Presentation Video] [Project Page]
  • (2016) Karthik Desingh, Mehran Maghoumi, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Joseph J. LaViola Jr., Lionel Reveret. “Object Manipulation in Cluttered Scenes Informed by Physics and Sketching“, RSS 2016 Workshop: Geometry and Beyond – Representations, Physics, and Scene Understanding for Robotics
    [PDF]
  • (2014) Mehran Maghoumi and Brian J. Ross. “A Comparison of Genetic Programming Feature Extraction Languages for Image Classification“, IEEE SSCI 2014
    [PDF]

Dissertation and Theses:

  • (2020) Deep Recurrent Networks for Gesture Recognition and Synthesis, PhD dissertation
    [PDF]
  • (2014) Real-time Automatic Object Classification and Tracking using Genetic Programming and NVIDIA CUDA, M.Sc. thesis
    [Project Page]

Awards and Honors:

  • (2021) IUI 2021 Honorable Mention Award
  • (2017) SIGCHI Best of CHI Honorable Mention Award
  • (2014) Recipient of UCF Graduate Dean’s Fellowship (4-year award)
  • (2013) Recipient of the Dean of Graduate Studies Spring Research Fellowship
  • (2012) Recipient of the Edgar and Irmgard Penner Trust Scholarship
  • (2007-2011) First class standing, Department of Computer Engineering, Sheikhbahaee University

Teaching Experience:

  • (2014) CDA 3103 – Computer Logic and Organization
  • (2014) CNT 3004 – Computer Networks
  • (2014) COSC 1P03 – Data Structures and Abstraction
  • (2013) COSC 3P98 – Computer Graphics
  • (2013) COSC 3P01 – Introduction to Computer Networking
  • (2012) APCO 1P01 – Applied Computing and Fluency with Technology
  • (2012) COSC 1P02 – Introduction to Computer Science