Dr. Abby  Stylianou 

Dr. Abby Stylianou is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Saint Louis University, and a Fellow of the Taylor Geospatial Institute. Dr. Stylianou’s research lies at the intersection of multimodal image retrieval, fine grained visual categorization, and explainable AI. In recent years, Dr. Stylianou’s research has focused on building citizen science data collection applications and global scale image search tools, specifically to support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s investigations of child sexual abuse and human trafficking. Dr. Stylianou is generally excited about applications of computer vision and machine learning that have the potential to benefit society in some way. Beyond the work to help in investigations of child sexual abuse and human trafficking, she has worked on developing systems for making measurements of the natural environment in time-lapse imagery to understand climate change, observing how individuals interact with the world around them in outdoor webcam images to support better design of the built environment, and developing new vision and machine learning algorithms and systems for agriculture and plant breeding to develop more sustainable, more resilient, and healthier crops. Dr. Stylianou is the Communications Officer for the IEEE Technical Community on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and regularly serves as Social Media Chair and Area Chair for a variety of premier computer vision conferences, including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and WACV.