Raquel Urtasun
Raquel Urtasun is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision in the Department of Computer Science.[1] Urtasun uses artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, to make vehicles and other machines perceive the world more accurately and efficiently.[2] In May 2017 Uber hired her to lead a Toronto-based research team for the company's self-driving car program.[3]
Education
Urtasun's bachelor's degree is from Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000 and her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Following that she was a postdoctoral scholar at both MIT and UC Berkeley.
Career
Professor Urtasun's area of research is machine perception for self-driving cars. This work entails include machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing. Before taking up her current role at the University of Toronto, she was an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) and briefly served as a visiting professor at ETH Zurich in 2010.
At Uber Urtasun will lead a research hub called the Advanced Technologies Group. Uber will hire dozens of researchers and also make a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment to Toronto’s Vector Institute, which Urtasun co-founded.[4] She will work for the University of Toronto one day per week and the other four for Uber.[3] Urtasun is bringing eight students with her, and Uber says it hopes to attract other talent from the region.[5]
Awards
Among Urtasun's awards are an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award. She is the recipient of Faculty Research Awards from both Amazon and Google, the latter three times. She served as Program Chair of CVPR 2018, and is an Editor of the International Journal in Computer Vision (IJCV). She has also served as Area Chair of several machine learning and vision conferences including NIPS, UAI, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, and ECCV.
References
- ^ "Raquel Urtasun Home Page". University of Toronto. Retrieved 2017-05-10.
- ^ "Uber opening Toronto research hub for driverless car technology". Toronto Star. Retrieved 2017-08-28.
- ^ a b "Uber Is Opening Up A Self-Driving Car Center In Canada". Buzzfeed. Retrieved 2017-08-28.
- ^ "Uber Hires an AI Superstar in the Quest to Rehab Its Future". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 2017-08-28.
- ^ "Uber setting up artificial intelligence lab in Toronto". Associated Press. Retrieved 2017-08-28.