My research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. I focus on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.
I received my B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia, in 2015, 2018, and 2022, respectively. I was a research intern at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab (SVL), supervised by Prof. Juan Carlos Niebles. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at KAUST, working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem.
[Note] I am always looking for talented Ph.D. students for internships at KAUST. If you have a research idea that connects with my research interests, I would be happy to hear from you. Feel free to send me an email at carlos DOT hinojosa AT kaust DOT edu DOT sa.
| Jul. 2026 | Our paper “Structured-Noise Masked Modeling for Video, Audio and Beyond” will appear as an oral presentation at ECCV 2026 in Malmö, Sweden!
| Jul. 2026 | Our paper “Multimodal Safety Evaluation in Generative Agent Social Simulations” was published at ACL 2026!
| Jun. 2026 | Our paper “CURE: Curriculum-Guided Multi-Task Training for Reliable Anatomy-Grounded Report Generation” was presented as an oral presentation at CVPR 2026!
| Jun. 2026 | My patent “Systems and Methods for Privacy-Preserving Optics” (with Prof. Juan Carlos Niebles and Prof. Henry Arguello) has officially been issued as US Patent No. 12,651,379 B2!
| May. 2026 | I started an academic visit at the University of Oxford, working closely with Adel Bibi and Philip Torr, FREng, FRS on AI safety research.
| May. 2026 | Our second patent, “Systems and Methods for Recognizing Human Actions from Privacy-Preserving Optics,” received a Notice of Allowance from the USPTO — issuance is now pending.
| Apr. 2026 | Excited to share that our Competitive Research Grant (CRG) proposal on Safe Operating System Agents has been awarded! Over the next three years, this KAUST-Oxford collaboration (with Prof. Bernard Ghanem and Prof. Mohamed Elhoseiny at KAUST, and Dr. Adel Bibi and Prof. Philip Torr at Oxford) will focus on building safe and reliable AI agents that operate across real-world digital environments.
| Feb. 2026 | I presented our paper “ColorMAE: Exploring Data-Independent Masking Strategies in Masked AutoEncoders” at the Research Symposium on AI & Its Impact, part of the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, India.
| Feb. 2026 | I served as Session Chair and Scientific Committee member for the KAUST Rising Stars in AI Symposium 2026.
| Jan. 2026 | I am an invited speaker at The Middle East and North Africa Machine Learning (MenaML) Winter School 2026. Talk title: “The Rise of Multi-Agent Systems: Capabilities, Opportunities, and Safety Considerations”.
| Jul. 2025 | Our Paper UnMix-NeRF has been accepted in ICCV 2025!
| Jun. 2025 | I’m excited to share that I’m co-organizing the 1st Workshop on Safe and Trustworthy Multimodal AI Systems (SaFeMM-AI) at ICCV2025!
| May. 2025 | I am an Area Chair for BMVC 2025.
| Sep. 2024 | I am an invited speaker at the 2nd Workshop on Privacy For Vision & Imaging at ECCV 2024.
| Jul. 2024 | Our ColorMAE paper has been accepted in ECCV 2024, and will also be presented at the Self Supervised Learning: What is Next workshop! See you in Milan.
| Aug. 2023 | I am editor of the EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing. Check the published Collection articles here
| 2021 - 2023 | I co-organized the LatinX in Computer Vision (LXCV) workshop at ICCV 2021, CVPR 2022, CVPR 2023, and ICCV 2023.
| Oct. 2022 | Our paper “Optics Lens Design for Privacy-preserving Scene Captioning” won the Best Paper Award from the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP2022)! See here.
| Apr. 2022 | I successfully defended my Ph.D. and got the laureate distinction!
Journal and conference papers I have published