Personal profile
Research interests
Spans broadly the areas of multimedia signal processing and computer vision with a particular interest in the following scopes:
- Affect and emotion understanding from images and videos: Facial micro-expression analysis, image aesthetics, and multimodal analysis of emotions in visual media
- Visual surveillance tasks: Activity recognition, person/group re-identification, long-term video analytics, defect inspection and monitoring
- Classical image/video processing algorithms i.e. object detection and tracking, high-resolution processing, image enhancement and restoration, skeleton extraction
Know more about the research that I do from my lab website.
Roles & Responsibilities
Director of Research and Enterprise, Malaysia Campus, Sept 2025 - Current
Programme Director, BSc Computing Science (Malaysia campus), 2021 - 2025
Head and Principal Investigator, Multimedia Data Analysis (MuDA) Lab
Biography
Dr. John See is a Professor at School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Heriot-Watt University (Malaysia Campus) and an Associate Professor before that. He also leads the Multimedia Data Analysis (MuDA) Lab. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer at Multimedia University, Malaysia where he was the Chair of the Centre for Visual Computing (CVC), and founded the Visual Processing (ViPr) Lab. From 2017-2019, he was also a Visiting Research Fellow at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) as a recipient of the Belt and Road Initiative Young Scientist Fellowship. He received his Bachelor, Masters and PhD degrees from Multimedia University.
Dr. See has published more than 140 articles in reputable journals and conferences such as IEEE T-PAMI, T-AC, T-MM, T-CSVT, and top-ranked computer vision and AI conferences such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ACM Multimedia, AAAI and NeurIPS. He has served as chair of several workshops, special sessions, and in the technical programme committee of various international conferences. Over the span of his academic career, he has received more than MYR 3 million in research funding from international, national, and industrial grants as Principal Investigator (PI)/Co-PI.
He currently serves in the following editorial boards:
- Signal Processing, as Subject Editor (Senior Area Editor)
- IEEE Transactions on Multimedia as Associate Editor
- EURASIP Journal of Image and Video Processing as Associate Editor
- The Computer Journal as Associate Editor
- IEEE Access, as Associate Editor
- Frontiers in Signal Processing (Image Processing section) as Associate Editor
He is also a Member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Senior Member of IEEE, and was an Elected Member of the IEEE Multimedia Systems and Applications (MSA) Technical Committee (CAS) for Term 2020-2024 and Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Technical Committee (SPS) for Term 2021-2023.
Key Research Words/Phrases
Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Multimedia Signal Processing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Affective Computing
Keywords
- QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
- computer vision
- pattern recognition
- machine learning
- affective computing
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being -
SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy -
SDG 9 Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure -
SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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Few-shot Action Recognition via Intra- and Inter-Video Information Maximization
Liu, H., Chen, T., Li, Y., Li, S., See, J. & Lin, W., 16 Mar 2026, (E-pub ahead of print) In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. p. 1-18 18 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile79 Downloads (Pure) -
Machine learning models for volume and weight estimation in breast reconstruction planning
Teo, S.-P., See, M.-H., Lai, L.-L., Wong, L.-K., Nagappan, S., See, J., Rahmat, K., Ong, T.-A., Tan, M. I. S. M. H. & Ng, K.-H., 24 Jan 2026, In: Health Information Science and Systems. 14, 1, 33.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile28 Downloads (Pure) -
Sparse4D: Sparse-based End-to-end Multi-Sensor Temporal Perception
Lin, X., Pei, Z., Li, K., Lin, T., Huang, L., Yu, C., See, J., Su, Z. & Yang, C., 28 Apr 2026, (E-pub ahead of print) In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. p. 1-18 18 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile78 Downloads (Pure) -
Stable or Stuck? Understanding MLLM Engagement Prediction in Uncontrolled and Controlled HRI
Lim, J. Y., See, J., Yoo, W. W. & Dondrup, C., 16 Mar 2026, HRI Companion '26: Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, p. 650-654 5 p.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Open AccessFile2 Downloads (Pure) -
Unleashing Semantic and Geometric Priors for 3D Scene Completion
Chen, S., Sui, W., Zhang, B., Boukhers, Z., See, J. & Yang, C., 14 Mar 2026, Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Koenig, S., Jenkins, C. & Taylor, M. E. (eds.). Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, p. 3020-3028 9 p. (Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence; vol. 40, no. 4).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Open Access
Prizes
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Best Reviewer Award, IEEE ICIP 2020
See, J. (Recipient), 30 Sept 2020
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
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Outstanding Reviewer Award, CVPR 2021
See, J. (Recipient), 19 Jun 2021
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
Activities
- 3 Participation in workshop, seminar, course
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2nd Workshop on Facial Micro-Expression, ACM Multimedia 2022
See, J. (Chair), Yap, M. H. (Chair), Li, J. (Chair), Cheng, W. H. (Chair), Wang, S.-J. (Chair), Li, X. (Chair) & Hong, X. (Chair)
10 Oct 2022Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Participation in workshop, seminar, course
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Facial Micro-Expression Grand Challenge 2022
See, J. (Organiser), Yap, M. H. (Organiser), Hong, X. (Organiser), Li, J. (Organiser), Wang, S.-J. (Organiser), Cheng, W. H. (Organiser) & Li, X. (Organiser)
10 Oct 2022Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Participation in workshop, seminar, course
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PURE Workshop for HWUM MACS
See, J. (Participant), Wallis, A. (Participant), K.Ranthir Singh, K. S. (Participant), Tan, I. (Participant), Deena Kumari, R. (Participant), Mohd Nasarudin, A. A. (Participant), Soo, H. C. (Participant), Almasri, A. (Participant), S.Shitan, M. (Participant), Ong, K. L. (Participant), Tan, J. (Participant) & Nathai, A. (Participant)
14 Jun 2022Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Participation in workshop, seminar, course