Derek Hoiem

I'm a computer science assistant professor at UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). My main interest is in general visual scene understanding. Scene understanding is the ability to infer general principles and current situations in a way that helps to achieve goals. So far, much progress has been made by breaking down vision into a set of narrowly defined tasks and tackling them as independent pattern matching or image processing problems. I want to think of vision in terms of real-world space, surfaces, objects, and relations. I also want to develop frameworks that allow visual knowledge to be accumulated, so that each task contributes to a worldview that makes learning new tasks easier. My past includes a Postgraduate Beckman Fellowship at UIUC, Ph.D. at the Robotics Institute at CMU with Alyosha Efros and Martial Hebert, and collaborations at Intel Research Pittsburgh and Microsoft Research Cambridge.