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

Since September 2009, I'm an Assistant Professor at TTI-Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic institute located in the campus of the University of Chicago. I was a visiting professor at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010, working with Prof. Marc Pollefeys. 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 statistical learning and computer vision, with a particular interest in non-parametric Bayesian statistics, latent variable models, structured prediction and their application to 3D scene understanding and human pose estimation. I also like to do computer graphics from time to time.

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

Postdocs

• Marcus Brubaker (jointly with David Fleet at University of Toronto)

Current students

• Vikaskumar Garg (at TTIC)
• Andreas Geiger (jointly with Christoph Stiller at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
• Alexander Schwing (jointly with Marc Pollefeys and Tamir Hazan at ETH Zurich)
• Abhishek Sen (at TTIC)
• Jian Yao (at TTIC)

Visiting students

• Kan Chen (from Tsingua University)
• Philip Lenz (from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
• Roozbeh Mottaghi (from UCLA)
• Abhishek Sharma (from University of Maryland)
• Hongyi Zhang (from Peking University)
• Jian Zhang (from Tsingua University)

Past students

• Mario Christoudias (PhD, jointly with Trevor Darrell at MIT). Now postdoc at EPFL.
• Taehwan Kim (Masters, jointly supervised with Greg Shakhnarovich at TTIC)
• Alex Shyr (PhD, jointly with Michael I. Jordan and Trevor Darrell at UC Berkeley)

Past visiting students

• Roland Angst (from ETH Zurich).
• Martin Hjelm (from KTH)
• Aydin Varol (from EPFL)
• Angela Yao (from ETH Zurich)
• Jose Javier Yebes (from Universidad de Alcala)

Professional Service

• Chair: Workshop co-Chair NIPS 2012
• Area Chair / Senior Program Committee: NIPS 2010, NIPS 2011, NIPS 2012, UAI 2012
• Program Committee (computer vision): ICCV 2007, 2009, 2011, CVPR 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, ECCV 2008, 2010, 2012, ACCV 2010, BMVC 2011
• Program Committee (machine learning): NIPS 2008, 2009, ICML 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, AISTATS 2010, 2011, 2012, IJCAI 2009

Teaching

• Winter 2014 TTI course: Learning and Inference in Graphical Models.
• 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 Anaysis.
• 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

• "All you want to know about Gaussian Process", full-day tutorial with Neil Lawrence at CVPR 2012

Curriculum Vitae

• Full CV

Funding

• NSF 1017626: "Probabilistic Latent Variable Models for Sparse Data".

Highlights and News

• I'll be giving a tutorial at CVPR 2012 with Neil Lawrence on "all you want to know about Gaussian Processes"
• 1 paper accepted to appear in ICML 2012
• The KITTI benchmark suite has been released!
• 4 papers accepted to appear in CVPR 2012 (1 oral, 3 posters)
• 1 paper accepted to appear in AISTATS 2012
• 2 papers accepted to appear in NIPS 2011
• 1 paper accepted to appear in ICCV 2011
• 1 paper accepted to appear in ICML 2011
• 3 papers accepted to appear in CVPR 2011 (1 oral, 2 posters)
• 1 paper accepted to appear in FG 2011 (1 oral)

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.