Distinguished Regents’ Professor

Department: Computer Science

Dr. Hugo Jair Escalante will join the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 2026 as a Distinguished Regents Professor. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of ChaLearn, an international organization advancing machine learning through open scientific challenges, and as Vice-Chair of the IAPR Technical Committee 12 on Multimedia and Visual Information Systems. He is also a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and a Level II member of the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNII).

Dr. Escalante’s research focuses on challenge organization and machine learning, with applications in language and vision. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, cited over 9,000 times, and has received several best paper and thesis awards at international conferences.

He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning (2017–2023) and is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and the Data-Centric Machine Learning Research Journal. Dr. Escalante has organized and chaired numerous AI competitions and workshops, including NeurIPS 2019–2020, FG 2020, and ICPR 2020, and continues to contribute to leading venues such as CVPR and ICCV. He was recognized among the Top 6 Researchers in Computer Science in Mexico (Research.com, 2022–2025).

Keywords of Expertise: Machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Information Processing, Challenge organization, Computer Vision