My name is Mona Jalal and I am proudly a first-generation college student (both my parents were deprived of their rights to go to a university, sadly). Currently, I am a Computer Vision Research Engineer III at Toyota Material Handling HQ in Columbus, Indiana. I lead the efforts on 3D computer vision tasks such as 6D object pose estimation and synthetic data generation. I am interested in domain randomization, generative AI, Sim2Real, large vision and language models, zero-shot and few-shot learning (and overall learning with limited data). During my Computer Science graduate studies in Computer Vision at Boston University I was advised by Professor Margrit Betke and Professor Vijaya Kolachalama and I focused on efficient deep-learning based computer vision methods for cancer detection from H&E stained digital pathology whole-slide images, image and Text Analysis of Public Communications, 2D/3D human and animal object pose estimation and tracking, and 3D human/object interaction reconstruction from single 2D images. Prior to joining BU, I was an R&D Engineer 1 at University of California, Berkeley, FHL VIVE Center for Enhanced Reality, formerly known as Center for Augmented Cognition, working on an open-source framework for gesture recognition named OpenARK where I provided support for Intel RealSense SR300 camera for OpenARK augmented reality framework as well as creating a benchmark for OpenARK using CVAR hand pose dataset. I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with double major Master's in computer sciences (May 2016) and electrical engineering (August 2014). I have done projects in computer vision, data analysis, database management systems, big data systems and frameworks, Internet of Things, computer architecture, and dependable and fault-tolerant embedded systems. My computer science master project topic at UW-MAdison was creating and controlling a smart home using Internet of Things and open-source technologies. In my free time I like to learn about new software and hardware technologies and frameworks, ride my bike, and take 20k+ step walks. I did my first 100 KM bike ride on July 18, 2020, and I am looking forward to my first 100 miles bike ride sometimes in 2024.
I am both a professional IEEE and ACM member.
You can find a shorter version of my CV by clicking on short RESUME and you can access a more detailed version at long RESUME.
Please check my Google Scholar for a list of my research publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tTXTO0oAAAAJ&hl=en, 203 citations, h-index of 7, and i10-index of 7 as of April 04, 2024.

I hold the titles of computer scientist, electrical engineer, computer architect, and computer/hardware engineer as per my extensive and stellar training.

NEWS
  • April 03, 2024 I am attending CVPR 2024 conference in Seattle, WA. I am very grateful for Toyota Material Handling company for sponsoring my attendance.
  • February 05, 2024 Invited as a reviewer for Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) 2024
  • January 2024 Elected to review SIGGRAPH 2024 submissions
  • October 29, 2023 Invited as a reviewer for IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)) 2024
  • August 2023 I attended SIGGRAPH 2023 conference in Los Angeles, CA. I am very grateful for Toyota Material Handling company for sponsoring my attendance.
  • July 2023 I attended ICML 2023 conference in Honolulu, HI. I am very grateful for Toyota Material Handling company for sponsoring my attendance.
  • July 2023 Recommended as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology by Dr. Jia Li.
  • May 2023 I attended the two-day training for Introduction to Toyota Leadership
  • April 06, 2023 Invited as a reviewer for Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NerIPS) 2023
  • March 31-April 01, 2023 I was recommended to be a judge for a two-day event of FIRST Robotic Competition by Mark Horne (from Toyota Material Handling) at Center Grove High School, Greenwood, Indiana.
  • March 03, 2023 Invited as a reviewer for VLDB journal by Dr. Matthias Boehm.
  • January 30, 2023 My I-140 NIW EB-2 (advanced degree or exceptional ability) application for green card was approved. I am grateful to Chen Immigration group as well as my recommenders Dr. Amir H. Assadi, Dr. Vikas Singh, Dr. Hamed Pirsiavash, and Dr. Vijaya Kolachalama.
  • January 21, 2023 I was recommended as a judge for FIRST FTC robotic competition by Brian Simpson at Centeral Middle School, Columbus, Indiana.
  • October 17, 2022 My O1A (Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement) visa got accepted. I am very grateful to Toyota Material Handling for sponsoring my visa and I am indefinitely grateful to my 6 recommenders Drs. Jia Li, Amir H. Assadi, Vikas Singh, Hamed Pirsiavash, Matthias Boehm, Vijaya Kolachalama for writing me recommendation letters for my application.
  • March 30, 2022 Invited as a reviewer for Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NerIPS) 2022
  • September 25, 2021 Invited as a reviewer for IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022
  • September 25, 2021 Accepted for Data Science Mentoring Circle (DSMC) FY 2021-2022, Mentor: Dr. Joseph Wang (Amazon Research). Founders: Dr. Clementine Plati and Dr. Eric Kolaczyk
  • August 31, 2021 Selected as an “Outstanding Reviewer” for ICCV 2021. Given to top 5% experienced reviewers and top 5% student reviewers to be acknowledged as “outstanding reviewers”, for their exceptional voluntary effort to review papers submitted to the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in its 2021 edition
  • August 31, 2021 Selected to attend Workshop for Women in Shape Analysis June 13-18, 2021. Mentor: Professor Cindy Grimm.
  • September 2020 I am a invited reviewer for AAAI 2021.
  • September 2020 I am a grader for EC/CS 523 -- Deep Learning -- course at Boston University
  • September 2020 I am a grader for CS 400 -- Introduction to Artificial Intelligence -- course at Boston University
  • September 2020 I am invited reviewer for ICLR 2021.
  • May 30, 2020 Attended WomenOfAI.org AI Summit, Saturday, May 30, 2020 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM (PDT).
  • May 20, 2020 I passed my PhD oral exam on 3D Human's Shape, Mesh, and Modeling with Applications Committee members: Professors Margrit Betke (BU), Kate Saenko (BU), Bryan Plummer (BU), Angjoo Kanazawa (external)
  • April 2020 I am volunteering for ICLR 2020 conference virtually.
  • February 2020 I am volunteering for AAAI 2020 conference in New York.
  • Spring 2020 I am a grader for CS585 -- Image and Video Computing -- at Boston University.
  • 11/14/2019 I'm giving a talk at Neuro-Autonomy: Neuroscience-Inspired Perception, Navigation, and Spatial Awareness for Autonomous Robots kickoff meeting on "2D/3D Pose Estimation in Animals, Humans, and Objects" as part of the ONR MURI grant with which I am funded as a research fellow for Fall 2019 semester. You can find the meeting agenda here.
  • 11/01/2019 I gave a "lightning talk" about my PhD research as part of the fellowship I received from Hariri Institute for Computing. You can read more here.
  • 08/28/2019 I gave a talk to Cortex team at Twitter on "Creating a hateful conduct tweet dataset as well as detecting hateful conduct in tweets based on both the tweet text and the users' sparse graph".
  • 06/11/2019 Won the 2019 Hariri Institute for Computing Graduate Student Fellowship which recognizes outstanding PhD students who pursue computational and data-driven research at Boston University.
  • 01/24/2019 Received Boston University Data Science (BUD) Brilliant Award and presented our work "Student Outcome Prediction on an Intelligent Tutoring System" as a poster in BU Data Science Day, February 6, 2019.
  • 11/03/2018 I gave a talk as an "invited speaker" on "Creating Synthetic Data for Deep Learning Applications" at Machine Intelligence Conference at MIT Media Lab.
  • 10/12/2018 Presented a poster on "Large-scale Synthetic Domain Randomized 6DoF Object Pose Estimation Dataset for Deep Learning Applications" at BU OpenAIR Day.
  • 06/01/2018-06/04/2018 I was a student coach for the basic track of Data+Narrative intensive course at the BU College of Communication supervised by Professor Maggie Mulvihill.
  • 05/24/2018 Our workshop on Crowdsourcing as a Content Analysis Tool will happen as a pre-conference to ICA on May 24th, 2018. I am the workshop designer and organizer along with Professor Lei Guo, Kate K. Mays, and Professor Margrit Betke who are the other workshop organizers.
  • 05/01/2018 I got full scholarship to attend RSS through Inclusion@RSS June 25th-June30th, Pittsburg, PA. Unfortunately, due to my internship Export Control License not getting clear in time, I lost the chance to attend this amazing conference. I want to sincerely thank the conference organizers for providing me with this great opportunity.
  • 04/27/2018 I got travel grant from WiNLP to present my paper as a poster at NAACL18 on June 1st, 2018 in New Orlean, LA.
  • 04/15/2018 Our workshop paper 'Performance Comparison of Crowdworkers and NLP Tools on Named-Entity Recognition and Sentiment Analysis of Political Tweets' got accepted in WiNLP workshop of NAACL-HLT 2018.
  • 04/03/2018 I was selected by RSIP-Vision magazine for an interview for their April version. Read my interview here
  • 03/20/2018 I got the full-time offer to work as a research intern for David Luebke with Dr. Josef Spjut, Dr. Morgan McGuire and Ben Boudaoud at North Carolina, Durham office.
  • 03/15/2018 I was recognized as Quora Top Writer in 2018.
  • 02/02/2018 I got travel grant to attend Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*) conference Feb23rd-Feb24th, 2018 in New York University School of Law, NY.
  • 01/29/2018 I was selected as the only recipient of Full Gold Scholarship to attend ODSC East 2018.
  • 01/11/2018 I presented my work on emotion recognition using machine learning and deep learning methods at BU Artificial Intelligence Research (AIR) retreat, Winter 2018, Vermont.