I am a Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at UW-Madison, where I lead the Wisconsin AI and Vision Lab (WAIV). My research interests are in computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on creating robust AI systems that can learn to understand our multimodal world with minimal human supervision. Before joining UW-Madison in Fall 2021, I spent one year as an AI Visiting Faculty at Cruise, and before that, 6 wonderful years as an Assistant and then Associate Professor at UC Davis. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the EECS Dept at UC Berkeley working with Alyosha Efros (8/2013-6/2014). I also spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (8/2012-8/2013), where I had the good fortune to work with Alyosha Efros and Martial Hebert. I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2012 under the supervision of Kristen Grauman, and my B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2006. I have also worked with Larry Zitnick and Michael Cohen as a summer intern at Microsoft Research.
Prospective PhD students: please apply to the UW-Madison Computer Sciences program if you'd like to work with me. Unfortunately, I may not be able to respond to individual emails about admissions.
News
- 6/2025: Honored to receive the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship
- 5/2025: Honored to be appointed to the Susan Beth Horwitz Professorship
- 5/2025: I've been promoted to Full Professor effective Fall 2025 -- huge thanks to all my wonderful students, colleagues, collaborators, mentors, and letter writers
- 8/2021: I joined the CS department at UW-Madison as an Associate Professor
- 9/2020: Our paper on adaptive anti-aliasing in convnets won the Best Paper Award at BMVC 2020 [link]
- 6/2020: I will join the CS department at UW-Madison as an Associate Professor in Fall 2021, and spend one year at Cruise as an AI Visiting Faculty till then
- 5/2020: I received tenure -- I am grateful to all my wonderful students, colleagues, collaborators, mentors, and letter writers
- 10/2019: Our real-time instance segmentation method, YOLACT, won the Most Innovative Award at the COCO Object Detection Challenge, ICCV 2019
- 9/2019: I received the UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award [link]
- 6/2019: My PhD student Krishna Kumar Singh won the 2019 UC Davis Best Graduate Researcher in Computer Science Award (Honorable Mention) -- congrats Krishna!
- 6/2019: My undergraduate student Daniel Bolya won the 2019 UC Davis Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research (Honorable Mention) -- congrats Daniel!
- 3/2019: I received the Adobe Data Science Research Award -- thanks Adobe!
- 8/2018: I received the AWS ML Research Award and a new NSF grant to study 1st-3rd person videos
- 6/2018: My PhD student Fanyi Xiao won the 2018 UC Davis Best Graduate Researcher in Computer Science Award -- congrats Fanyi!
- 3/2018: I received the NSF CAREER Award [link]
- 8/2017: I received the Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Award [link]
- 7/2017: I received the Hellman Foundation Fellowship [link]
- 4/2016: Organizing the 4th Workshop on Egocentric (First-Person) Vision at CVPR 2016 with Michael Ryoo (Indiana), Kris Kitani (CMU), and Yin Li (Georgia Tech)
- 7/2014: I joined the CS department at UC Davis as an Assistant Professor
Research Interests
My main research interests are in computer vision and machine learning. I am particularly interested in creating robust AI systems that can understand our multimodal world with minimal human supervision.
Teaching