Upal Mahbub

Ph.D., Senior Member IEEE
Staff ML Engineer, Multimedia R&D, Qualcomm, San Diego, California
Chair, IEEE San Diego Section
Chair, IEEE SPS San Diego Chapter
IEEE CS T&C Member-at-Large, 2026
Volunteer Resource Manager, IEEE CS
IEEE CS Area 4 Coordinator of R5 & R6, 2026

I am a Staff Engineer at Qualcomm’s Multimedia R&D Lab in San Diego, California, where I develop hardware-efficient computer vision for XR and mobile platforms — including real-time hand pose estimation, 3D scene reconstruction, facial landmark detection, and always-on camera algorithms. My work centers on bringing machine intelligence to resource-constrained, embedded systems under tight compute, memory, and power budgets.

I hold a Ph.D. and am a Senior Member of the IEEE. I have authored 40+ peer-reviewed publications, hold seven granted patents, and have co-edited books and special issues on human activity analysis and thermal/infrared imaging. I review for CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, and AAAI, and was recognized as a CVPR Outstanding Reviewer in 2022. You can find my work on the publications page and on Google Scholar.

I am an active IEEE volunteer. Within the IEEE Computer Society, I serve as Volunteer Resource Manager, Area 4 (R5 & R6) Coordinator, and Member-at-Large of the Technical & Conference (T&C) Ad Hoc Committee. I led the IEEE CS San Diego Chapter as Chair (2023–2025) and now serve as its Vice Chair; under my leadership the chapter received the 2025 Chapter Excellence Award from the IEEE San Diego Section, and I was recognized for outstanding service and leadership as the 2025 IEEE San Diego Chapter Chair. Beyond the Computer Society, I serve as Chair of the IEEE San Diego Section and Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society San Diego Chapter.

As Industry Lead for IEEE CS Career Catalyst 2025, I fostered Qualcomm collaboration and organized a site visit and networking reception with IEEE President Dr. Kathleen Kramer; I now serve as Vice Chair of Industry Collaboration for 2026, and as Chair of the Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship (Spring 2026). I was named one of IEEE Computer Society’s 2024 Top 30 Early Career Professionals, and received the University of Maryland Early Career Distinguished Alumni Award (2024) and the San Diego County Engineering Council Outstanding Engineering Service Award (2024).

News

Jan 18, 2026 Recognized for outstanding service and leadership as IEEE San Diego Section Chair in 2025 at the 2026 IEEE San Diego Annual Banquet. At the same event, the IEEE Computer Society San Diego Chapter, which I chaired, received a Chapter Excellence Award.
Feb 24, 2025 One of the winners of Computing’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals for 2024. This recognition honors individuals who have shown exceptional achievements early in their careers and are driving advancements in computing. These rising stars are contributing to a wide range of areas, from AI, software engineering, security, and hardware, shaping the future of technology. Details here.
Sep 27, 2024 Early Career Distinguished Alumni Award, A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland College Park, 2024. List of 2024 inductees here.
Jul 1, 2024 Co-edited book titled, “Computer Vision: Challenges, Trends and Opportunities” got published from CRC Press (Taylor and Francis Group). Editors Md. Atiqur Rahman Ahad., Upal Mahbub, Mathew Turk., Richard Hartley.. The book is available on CRC press’s site here. as well as on other platforms like Amazon..
Feb 20, 2024 Received “Outstanding Service Award” from the San Diego County Engineering Council. All past award winners listed here.
Feb 9, 2023 Exciting news! My children’s poetry book got published from Panjeree Publications Ltd. and now available in the Ekushey Bookfair in Bangladesh. Details here.. Really happy with the illustration and how the book turned out.
Jan 29, 2023 Serving as Chair of Computer Society for the IEEE San Diego Section this year. Looking forward to an exciting year!
Jun 26, 2022 Exciting news! Recognized as an outstanding reviewer for CVPR 2022. List of the 100 outstanding reviewers of CVPR 2022 is here.
Apr 3, 2022 Added a tab for blog. Figuring out how to publish the website.
Apr 1, 2022 Added contents to publications, artworks and downloads tabs.

Selected Publications

  1. Best Paper: UEMCON’16
    PATH: Person Authentication using Trace Histories
    Upal Mahbub, and Rama Chellappa
    In The 7th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (IEEE UEMCON) (Best Paper: UEMCON’16) , 2016
    PDF Website
  2. Google Collab: ICIP’16
    Partial face detection for continuous authentication
    Upal Mahbub, Vishal M Patel, Deepak Chandra, Brandon Barbello, and Rama Chellappa
    In 2016 IEEE international conference on Image processing (ICIP) (Google Collab: ICIP’16) , 2016
    PDF Website
  3. Book Chapter ’21
    Contactless human monitoring: challenges and future direction
    Upal Mahbub, Tauhidur Rahman, and Md Atiqur Rahman Ahad
    In Contactless Human Activity Analysis (Book Chapter ’21) , 2021
    PDF
  4. Book ’21
    Contactless Human Activity Analysis
    Md Atiqur Rahman Ahad, Upal Mahbub, and Tauhidur Rahman
    (Book ’21) , 2021
    Website
  5. CV4ARVR, ICCV ’21
    DIREG3D: DIrectly REGress 3D Hands from Multiple Cameras
    Ashar Ali, Upal Mahbub, Gökçe Dane, and Gerhard Reitmayr
    In Fifth Workshop on Computer Vision for AR/VR (CV4ARVR), ICCV (CV4ARVR, ICCV ’21) , 2021
    PDF Website