Carl Vondrick

Carl Vondrick is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research focuses on creating robust and versatile perception systems that leverage video and interaction with the natural world, with applications in 3D reconstruction, visual question answering, and robot manipulation.

• Former research scientist at Google
• Visiting researcher at Cruise

Education:

• PhD (2017) from MIT, advised by Antonio Torralba
• BS (2011) from UC Irvine, advised by Deva Ramanan

His research explores multimodal approaches for cross-task and cross-modal transfer, scene dynamics, audiovisual perception, interpretable models, and spatial awareness systems. The lab emphasizes zero-shot generalization and neuro-symbolic methods while addressing safety and robustness in AI systems.

Key publication trends include:

• 2025: Video generation for robotics
• 2024: Differentiable rendering and cross-modal reasoning
• 2023: Robust perception and 3D modeling

Scientific Awards:

• 2024 PAMI Young Researcher Award
• 2021 NSF CAREER Award

Teaching Roles: Teaching Computer Vision II (2021-2025), Computer Vision I (2018-2019), and Representation Learning (2020-2022).

Advising: Advises 8 current PhD students and has mentored 5 graduated students now at institutions like MBZUAI and UMD. The lab recruits 1-2 PhD students annually through Columbia’s PhD program.

Grants and Collaborations: Funded by NSF, DARPA, Toyota Research Institute, Amazon Research, and Google.