Assistant Professor Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago 6045 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 e-mail: rurtasun (at) ttic (dot) edu tel: +1 (773) 834-2550 fax: +1 (773) 834-9881 Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich Institut für Visual Computing ETH Zentrum CNB 106.2 Universitätstrasse 6 8092 Zürich, Switzerland Tel: + 41 (0) 44 633 69 88 Fax: +41 (0) 44 632 17 39

I'm an Asssistant Professor at TTI-Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic institute located in the campus of the University of Chicago.

NEW: I'm visiting ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010, working with Prof. Marc Pollefeys. I'm teaching a new class on Human Motion Analysis.

I'm looking for motivated students interested in the areas of machine learning, computer vision and graphics. Please contact me for details.

Previously I was a postdoctoral research scientist at UC Berkeley EECS and ICSI. Before that, I was a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where I worked with Prof. Trevor Darrell.

I completed my PhD at the Computer Vision Laboratory, at EPFL, Switzerland, on June 2006, under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Fua and Prof. David Fleet at the University of Toronto. I previously worked as a research assistant at the Ecole National Superior de Telecomunication (ENST) in Paris, in the Image Procesing Department. I graduated as an Electric Engineer in the Universidad Publica de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. I did my Master Thesis in Eurecom, France. My major interests are machine learning, computer vision and their integration with Computer Graphics. [full CV].

Teaching

• Spring 2010 ETH Zurich course: Human Motion Anaysis.
• I'm helping David MacAllester 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.

Current students

• Taehwan Kim (jointly with Greg Shakhnarovich at TTIC)
• Alex Shyr (jointly with Michael I. Jordan and Trevor Darrell at UC Berkeley)

Past students

• Mario Christoudias (jointly with Trevor Darrell at MIT). Now postdoc at UC Berkeley EECS & ICSI.

Publications

• List of ALL publications

Curriculum Vitae

• Full CV

Recent/Upcoming papers (last 2 years)

• M. Salzmann and R. Urtasun
  Combining Discriminative and Generative Methods for 3D Deformable Surface and Articulated Pose Reconstruction
  To appear in Conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), San Francisco, June 2010


• A. Shyr, R. Urtasun and M. Jordan
  Sufficient Dimensionality Reduction for Visual Sequence Classification
  To appear in Conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), San Francisco, June 2010


• M. Salzmann, C. Ek, R. Urtasun and T. Darrell
  Factorized Orthogonal Latent Spaces
  To appear in International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), Sardinia, Italy, May 2010


• A. Kapoor, K. Graumann, R. Urtasun and T. Darrell
  Gaussian Processes for Object Categorization
  To appear in International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 2009


• N. D. Lawrence and R. Urtasun
  Non-linear Matrix Factorization with Gaussian Processes [pdf] [software]
  In International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML), Montreal, June 2009


• A. Geiger, R. Urtasun and T. Darrell
  Rank Priors for Continuous Non-Linear Dimensionality Reduction [pdf] [video]
  In Conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Miami, June 2009


• C. M. Christoudias, R. Urtasun, A. Kapoor and T. Darrell
  Co-training with noisy perceptual observations
  In Conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Miami, June 2009

Talks on the web

• 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.