Rate My Professor Cees Snoek

Prof. dr. C.G.M. (Cees) Snoek is a full professor of computer science at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Science, Informatics Institute, where he holds the chair of Intelligent Sensory Information Systems. He heads the Video & Image Sense Lab and the interdisciplinary Human-Aligned Video AI Lab (HAVA Lab). Snoek obtained his M.Sc. degree in Business Information Systems in 2000 and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2005, both from the University of Amsterdam; his doctoral thesis was titled 'The Authoring Metaphor to Machine Understanding of Multimedia.' His academic career at the University of Amsterdam includes postdoctoral researcher (2005-2008), VENI research fellow (2009-2012), assistant professor (2011-2013), associate professor (2013-2017), and full professor since 2018. He has held visiting positions as researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (2003) and Fulbright Junior Scholar at UC Berkeley (2010-2011). In industry, he served as Head of R&D at Euvision Technologies (2011-2014), Principal Engineer and Managing Principal Engineer at Qualcomm Technologies (2014-2017), and currently acts as Chief Scientific Officer at Kepler Vision Technologies.

Snoek directs multiple AI research labs, including QUVA Lab with Qualcomm Technologies (since 2015), Atlas Lab with TomTom (2019-2025), and OpenBots Lab with Delft University of Technology, TNO, and the Ministry of Defence. He is Scientific Director of Amsterdam AI (since 2022) and has previously directed the Master Artificial Intelligence program (2018-2022). His research focuses on computer vision, video understanding, and multimodal foundation models through deep learning. Author of over 300 refereed publications with more than 23,000 citations and an h-index exceeding 70 on Google Scholar, he led the MediaMill Semantic Video Search Engine, the consistent top performer in NIST TRECVID evaluations for over a decade. Key publications include 'University of Amsterdam and Renmin University at TRECVID 2016: Searching Video, Detecting Events and Describing Video' (2016) and contributions to TRECVID semantic indexing tasks. Snoek has received the NWO Veni award (2008), NWO Vidi award (2012), Netherlands Prize for ICT Research (2012), Fulbright Junior Scholarship, and numerous best paper awards such as ACM Multimedia (2014, 2016), ACM ICMR (2016), and top performances in ImageNet, THUMOS, and TRECVID challenges. He served as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2020-2024), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2012-2015), and others; general chair of ACM Multimedia 2016; and frequently as area chair for major computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia conferences. Seven of his former mentees hold professorial positions.