Founder & CEO Waabi Co-Founder of the Vector Institute for AI NSERC EWR Steacie Fellow Full Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 6 King's College Rd, Pratt Building 290E Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G4 Canada Twitter: @RaquelUrtasun YouTube Channel: to view and subscribe e-mail: urtasun (at) cs (dot) toronto (dot) edu tel: +1 (416) 946-8482

Raquel Urtasun is the Founder and CEO of Waabi. She is also a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. From 2017 to 2021 she was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG. From 2015-2017 she was a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision (from which she resigned to join Uber). Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with the University of Chicago. She was also a visiting professor at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010. She received her Bachelors degree from Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000, her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley. She is a world leading expert in AI for self-driving cars. Her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics, AI and remote sensing. Her lab was selected as an NVIDIA NVAIL lab. She is a recipient of an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two NVIDIA Pioneer Research Awards, a Connaught New Researcher Award, a Fallona Family Research Award and two Best Paper Runner up Prize awarded at CVPR in 2013 and 2017 respectively. She was also named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the year, and 2018 Toronto's top influencers by Adweek magazine.

I'm looking for motivated students interested in the areas of self-driving cars, computer vision, machine learning, remote sensing and robotics. To join my group at the University of Toronto as a PhD student or master student, you will have to apply to the CS department at the University of Toronto. See link here for more details.

Highlights and News

• 2 papers accepted to appear at CORL 2021
• 3 papers (1 oral, 2 posters) accepted to appear at ICCV 2021
• 3 papers accepted to appear at IROS 2021
• Tutorial All About Self-driving at CVPR 2021
• 8 papers (3 orals, 5 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2021
• 3 papers accepted to appear at ICRA 2021
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICLR 2021
• 5 papers accepted to appear at CORL 2020
• 2 papers accepted to appear at NeurIPS 2020
• 12 papers (2 oral, 2 spotlight, 8 posters) accepted to appear at ECCV 2020
• 3 papers accepted to appear at IROS 2020
• Tutorial All About Self-driving at CVPR 2020
• 2 papers accepted to appear at ICML 2020
• 5 papers (2 oral, 3 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2020
• 1 papers (oral) accepted to appear at ICRA 2020
• 1 papers accepted to appear at NeurIPS 2019
• 2 papers accepted to appear at CORL 2019
• 5 papers (1 oral, 4 posters) accepted to appear at ICCV 2019
• 2 papers accepted to appear at IROS 2019
• I'll be giving the Plenary at ICRA 2019 on A Future with Affordable Self-driving Vehicles
• 7 papers (2 orals, 5 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2019
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICRA 2019
• 3 papers accepted to appear at ICLR 2019
• I'll be giving a Keynote at IROS 2018 and at GCPR on A Future with Affordable Self-driving Vehicles
• On October 2018 I received the UPNA Alumni Award
• 1 paper accepted to appear at NIPS 2018
• 3 papers accepted to appear at CoRL 2018
• 3 papers accepted to appear at ECCV 2018
• 1 paper accepted to appear at IROS 2018
• 1 paper accepted to appear at IV 2018
• On April 2018 I received a Fallona Family Research Award for my interdisciplinary work
• 2 papers accepted to appear at ICML 2018
• 9 papers (1 oral, 3 spotlight, 5 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2018
• 1 paper to appear at ICRA 2018
• We received the 'Best Paper Runner Up Award' at CVPR 2017 for our polyRNN paper
• 2 papers accepted to appear at NIPS 2017
• 7 papers (2 orals, 1 spotlight, 4 posters) accepted to appear at ICCV 2017
• In May 1st 2017 I joined Uber as Head of Uber ATG Toronto. This is an incredibly exciting moment as self-driving cars are finally coming to Canada!!
• In February 2017 I was awarded the NSERC EWR Steacie Fellowship for my work on Machine Perception for self-driving cars. This is given each year to the top 6 Scientists and Engineers in Canada (midcareer). Photos of the ceremony with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ministers, Members of Parlament and the Governor General of Canada David Johnston are avaible here
• On Feb 2017 I received my third Google Faculty Research Award
• 4 papers (1 oral, 3 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2017
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICLR 2017
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICRA 2017
• On Dec 2016 I received a Amazon Academic Research Award
• I'll be Area Chair of ICML 2017, ICCV 2017 and NIPS 2017 (senior role)
• CBC wrote an interesting article about my work on Self-driving cars
• I'll be giving a Keynote at BMVC 2016 on Affordable Self-driving Cars
• 3 papers accepted to appear at NIPS 2016
• I received the NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award in the GTC16. This comes with the new DGX1. Thanks NVIDIA!
• UofT Arts and Sciences Rising Stars article
• 5 papers (2 spotlights, 3 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2016
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICML 2016
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICLR 2016 as an oral
• On Feb 2016 I received a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Machine Learning and Computer Vision
• On Feb 2016 I received a Google Faculty Research Award
• I'll be giving a Keynote on Deep Structured Models at ICLR 2016
• 1 paper accepted to appear at AISTATS 2016
• 5 papers (2 orals, 3 posters) accepted to appear at ICCV 2015
• 2 papers accepted to appear at NIPS 2015
• I'll be Area Chair of ICLR 2016, ICRA 2016, ICML 2016, ACCV 2016, UAI 2016, ECCV 2016 and 3DV 2016
• I'm Tutorial co-chair with Sanja Fidler at CVPR 2016
• This December I'll be giving a tutorial on Deep Structured Models at ICCV15 with Alexander Schwing
• This August I'm giving a lecture at the Vision and Sports Summer School on Deep Structured Models m[Slides][Slides_compressed]
• This July I'm giving a lecture at the Computational Vision Summer School (CVSS) on Deep Structured Models [Slides]
• This July I'm giving a lecture at the Biomed Summer School, on Deep Structured Models
• 1 paper to appear as oral at BMVC 2015 as oral
• On June 7th at CVPR15 I'm giving a tutorial on Indoor Scene Understanding with Sanja Fidler
• On May 2015 I received a Ministry of Research & Innovation Early Researcher Award
• On May 2015 I received an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement
• 1 paper on Deep Structured Learning to appear at ICML 2015
• 3 papers to appear at PAMI 2015
• 6 papers (2 orals and 4 posters) accepted to appear at CVPR 2015
• On Feb 2015 I received a Google Faculty Research Award
• I'm area chair of UAI 2015, CVPR 2015 and ICML 2015
• 1 paper accepted to appear at WACV 2015
• 2 papers accepted to appear at NIPS 2014
• We have released Object Part Labelings of the PASCAL 2010 dataset
• We have released Full Segmentation Labelings of the PASCAL 2010 dataset, which contains annotations for 400+ categories
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ACCV 2014
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ECCV 2014
• 1 paper accepted to appear at UAI 2014
• On May 2014 I received the Connaught New Researcher Award
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICML 2014
• 6 papers accepted to appear at CVPR 2014
• 1 paper accepted to appear at ICCP 2014 as an oral
• I'm co-organizing a workshop on the Reconstruction Meets Recognition Challenge at ECCV 2014
• I'm co-organizing a workshop on Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving at ECCV 2014
• I accepted a position at the University of Toronto. I'll be moving in January 2014
• I'm area chair of ECCV 2014 and CVPR 2014
• I'm tutorial co-chair with Kristen Grauman at CVPR 2014 and Doctoral Consortium Chair at CVPR 2014
• 1 paper accepted to appear at NIPS 2013
• 4 papers accepted to appear in ICCV 2013 (1 oral, 3 posters)
• I'm co-organizing a workshop on the Reconstruction Meets Recognition Challenge at ICCV 2013
• I'm co-organizing a workshop on Graphical Models for Scene Understanding: Challenges and Perspectives at ICCV 2013
• I'm co-organizing a workshop on Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving at ICCV 2013
• We received the 'Best Paper Runner Up Award' at CVPR 2013 for our probabilistic visual self-localization paper
• I'll be visiting Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, during September 2013
• I'm at MIT visiting Antonio Torralba during May 2013
• Our paper on KITTI has been accepted to appear in IJRR 2013
• 5 papers accepted to appear in CVPR 2013 (2 orals, 3 posters)
• I'm in the Editorial Board of IJCV
• I'm area chair of ICML 2013 and ICCV 2013

Current graduate students

• Ioan-Andrei Barsan (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Sergio Casas Romero (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Davi Frossard (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Namdar Homayounfar (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Wei-Chiu Ma (PhD student jointly with Antonio Torralba at Waabi / MIT)
• Siva Manivasagam (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Sean Segal (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Simon Suo (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Jingkang Wang (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Kelvin Wong (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Yuwen Xiong (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Bin Yang (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Joyce Yang (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Ze Yang (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Wenyuan Zeng (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• Chris Zhang (PhD student at Waabi / UofT)
• James Tu (MS student at Waabi / UofT)

Past Postdocs

• Marcus Brubaker (at TTIC). Now Assistant professor at York University
• Marc Law (at UofT). Now Research Scientist at NVIDIA
• Gellert Mattyus (at UofT). Now at Uber ATG Toronto
• Alexander Schwing (at UofT). Now Assistant professor at UIUC

Past graduate students

• Shenlong Wang (PhD student at Uber ATG / UofT). Now Assistant Professor at UIUC
• Mengye Ren (PhD student jointly with Rich Zemel at Uber ATG / UofT). Now Assistant Professor at NYU
• Renjie Liao (PhD student jointly with Rich Zemel at Uber ATG / UofT). Now Assistant Professor at UBC
• Eleni Triantafillou (PhD student jointly with Rich Zemel at UofT). Now Research Scientist at Google Brain London, UK
• Xiaohui Zeng (Ms student jointly with Sanja Fidler at University of Toronto). Now PhD student at UofT
• Annie Zhang (MS student at Uber ATG / UofT)
• Min Bai (PhD student at Uber ATG / UofT). Now Research Scientist at Amazon
• Wenjie Luo (PhD student at Uber ATG / UofT). Now Research Scientist at Waymo
• Kaustav Kundu (PhD student jointly with Sanja Fidler at UofT). Now Research Scientist at Amazon
• Lluis Castrejon (MS student jointly with Sanja Fidler at University of Toronto). Now PhD student at MILA Montreal
• Dominic Cheng (MS student at UofT). Now Program Manager at Microsoft
• Joel Cheverie (MS student from UofT). Now Engineer at Shopify
• Mario Christoudias (PhD, jointly with Trevor Darrell at MIT). Now postdoc at EPFL.
• Philip Lenz (PhD, jointly with Christoph Stiller at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Now researcher at Bosch, Germany.
• Vikas Garg (Masters at TTIC). Now PhD student at MIT
• Andreas Geiger (PhD, jointly with Christoph Stiller at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Now Full Professor at University of Tubingen
• Taehwan Kim (Masters, jointly supervised with Greg Shakhnarovich at TTIC). Now PhD student at TTIC
• Justin Liang (Masters at UofT) Now Research Scientist at Waabi.
• Abhishek Sen (Masters at TTIC)
• Alexander Schwing (jointly with Marc Pollefeys and Tamir Hazan at ETH Zurich). Now Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto
• Alex Shyr (PhD, jointly with Michael I. Jordan and Trevor Darrell at UC Berkeley)
• Ivan Vendrov (Masters, jointly with Sanja Fidler at University of Toronto). Now at Google
• Jian Yao (PhD student at University of Toronto). Now Research Scientist at Apple
• Lisa Zhang (Masters jointly with Rich Zemel at UofT) Now Lecturer at University of Toronto
• Ziyu Zhang (MS student jointly with Sanja Fidler at University of Toronto)
• Yukun Zhu (Masters, jointly with Sanja Fidler and Ruslan Salakhutdinov at University of Toronto). Now at Google

Past visiting students

• Mengxi Li (Undergrad student from Tsinghua University). Now PhD student at Stanford
• Yen-Chen Lin (Undergrad student from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan). Now PhD student at MIT
• Diego Marcos Gonzalez (PhD student from University of Zurich).
• Sergio Casas Romero (Undergrad student from Polytechnic University of Catalonia). Now Master student at University of Toronto
• Yuwen Xiong (Undergrad student from Zhejiang University). Now Master student at University of Toronto
• Amlan Kar (2016, Undergrad student from IIT Kanpur). Now Master student at University of Toronto
• Ruiyu Li (2016, PhD student from Chinese University of Hong Kong)
• Shu Liu (2016, PhD student from Chinese University of Hong Kong)
• Wei-Chiu Ma (Master student from CMU). Now PhD student at MIT
• Nina Merkle (2016, PhD student from DLR, Germany)
• Xiaojuan Qi (2016, PhD student from Chinese University of Hong Kong)
• Vasu Sharma (2016, Undergrad student from IIT Kanpur)
• Marvin Teichmann (2016, Master student from KIT, Germany). Now PhD student at University of Cambridge
• Oliver Tan (2016, Undergrad student from University of Toronto)
• Elias Tragas (2016, Undergrad student from University of Toronto). Now at Snapchat
• Wenyuan Zeng (2016, Undergrad student from Tsinghua University). Now PhD student at University of Toronto
• Davi Frossard (2016-17 Undergrad student from University of Toronto). Now master student at University of Toronto
• Hang Chu (2016, Master student from Cornell). Now PhD student at University of Toronto
• Makarand Tapaswi (2016, PhD student from KIT, Germany). Now Postdoc at University of Toronto
• Gellert Mattyus (2015-16, PhD student from DLR, Germany). Now Postdoc at University of Toronto
• Xiaozhi Chen (2014-15 PhD student from Tsinghua). Now at DJI
• Shiyong Cui (1015, Postdoc from DLR, Germany)
• Boris Ivanovic (2015, Undergrad University of Toronto). Now Master student at Stanford
• Urban Jezernik (2016, PhD student from University of Ljubljana)
• Song Yang (2015, Undergrad from Tsinghua). Now PhD student at Stanford University
• Erin Grant (2015, USRA Undergrad, University of Toronto). Now PhD student at UC Berkeley
• Vincent Perot (2015, UTRECS Undergrad, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal). Now at Google
• Ze (Aaron) Wang (2015, Undergrad student from University of Toronto)
• Kangwei Liu (2015, PhD student from NLPR, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
• Liang-Chieh Chen (2013-14, PhD student from UCLA). Now at Google
• Chenxi Liu (2014, Undergrad from Tsinghua). Now PhD student at UCLA
• Edgar Simo-Serra (2013-14, PhD student from UPC). Now Postdoc at Waseda University in Tokyo
• Jia Xu (2013-14, PhD student from University of Wisconsin-Madison). Now Research Scientist at the Intel Visual Computing Lab
• Yinan Zhao (2014, Undergrad from Tsinghua). Now PhD student at UT Austin
• Ziyu Zhang (2013, Undergrad from Tsingua University). Now at Snapchat
• Kong Chen (2013, Undergrad from Tsingua University). Now PhD student at CMU
• Yali Wang (2013, PhD student from Laval University, Canada)
• Roozbeh Mottaghi (2012-2013, PhD student from UCLA). Now postdoc at Stanford
• Zhou Ren (2013, Master student from UCLA)
• Ye Meng (2013, from BeiHang University)
• Hongyi Zhang (2012, Undergrad from Peking University). Now PhD student at MIT
• Jian Zhang (2012, Undergrad student from Tsingua University). Then master student at ETH Zurich, now PhD student at Stanford
• Kan Chen (2012, Undergrad from Tsingua University). Now PhD student at USC
• Abhishek Sharma (2012, PhD student from University of Maryland)
• Aydin Varol (2011-2012, PhD student from EPFL)
• Jose Javier Yebes (2011-2012, PhD student from Universidad de Alcala)
• Martin Hjelm (2011, Master student from KTH). Now PhD student at KTH
• Roland Angst (2010, PhD student from ETH Zurich). Now assistant professor at MPI/Stanford
• Angela Yao (2010, PhD student from ETH Zurich). Now postdoc at ETH Zurich

Professional Service

• Program Chair: CVPR 2018
• Chair: Workshop co-Chair NIPS 2012, Doctoral Consortium Chair CVPR 2014, Tutorial co-Chair CVPR 2014, Tutorial Chair CVPR 2016
• Area Chair / Senior Program Committee: NIPS 2010, NIPS 2011, NIPS 2012, UAI 2012, ICML 2013, ICCV 2013, CVPR 2014, ECCV 2014, CVPR 2015, ICML 2015, UAI 2015, ICLR 2016, ICML 2016, ICRA 2016, UAI 2016, ACCV 2016, ECCV 2016
• Program Committee (computer vision): ICCV 2007, 2009, 2011, CVPR 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, ECCV 2008, 2010, 2012, ACCV 2010, BMVC 2011, CVPR 2016
• Program Committee (machine learning): NIPS 2008, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, ICML 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 AISTATS 2010, 2011, 2012, IJCAI 2009

Teaching

• Winter 2016 UofT course CSC 2541: Visual Perception for Autonomous Driving.
• Fall 2015 UofT course CSC 411: Introduction to Machine Learning.
• Winter 2015 UofT course CSC 412: Probabilistic Graphical Models.
• Winter 2015 UofT course CSC 2515: Introduction to Machine Learning.
• Fall 2014 UofT course CSC 411: Machine Learning and Data Mining.
• Winter 2013 TTI course: Introduction to Computer Vision.
• Winter 2012 TTI course: Visual Recognition.
• Spring 2011 TTI course: Learning and Inference in Graphical Models, with Tamir Hazan
• Spring 2010 ETH Zurich course: Human Motion Analysis.
• I'm helping David McAllester and Nathan Srebro teach the TTI Autumn 2009 course: Statistical Learning in Artificial Intelligence.
• Fall 2007 MIT course: 6.976, Seminar on Human Motion Tracking with Trevor Darrell.
• I TA the spring 2002-2006 EPFL course: Introduction to computer vision.

Publications

• List of ALL publications

Tutorials

• "Deep Structured Models", half-day tutorial with Alexander Schwing at ICCV 2015
• "Indoor Scene Understanding", half-day tutorial with Sanja Fidler at CVPR 2015
• "All you want to know about Gaussian Process", full-day tutorial with Neil Lawrence at CVPR 2012

Challenges

• RMRC challenge, at ECCV 2014
• RMRC challenge, at ICCV 2013
• KITTI benchmark suite

Curriculum Vitae

• Full CV

Talks on the web

• A Gaussian Process View on MKL, at the NIPS 2010 workshop on New Directions in Multiple Kernel Learning (NIPS 2010) .




• Non-Linear Matrix Factorization with Gaussian Processes, at the 26th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2009).




• Topologically-Constrained Latent Variable Models, at the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2008).




• Gaussian Processes for Monocular 3D People tracking, at the Gaussian Processes in Practice Workshop, UK 2006.