Kris Kitani

Kris Kitani is an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute and Courtesy Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He also holds roles as a Research Scientist at Meta FAIR and Co-Director of CMU's Extended Reality Technology Center (XRTC). His research focuses on computer vision, human activity forecasting, first-person vision, inverse reinforcement learning, and assistive technologies for visually impaired individuals.

Kitani's education includes a BS from the University of Southern California, and MS and PhD from the University of Tokyo. His work bridges perception, decision-making, and interaction in autonomous systems, with applications in wearable cameras, assistive devices, and human-robot collaboration. He has advised numerous PhD and master's students, including current researchers like Jinkun Cao and Erica Weng.

Key awards include the Marr Prize honorable mention (ICCV 2017), Best Paper Honorable Mentions at CHI 2017/2020, and Best Paper Awards at W4A 2017/2019. His lab, the Cognitive Assistance Laboratory, develops systems for robust real-world perception and interactive decision-making.

Kitani teaches courses such as Graduate Computer Vision (16-720) and Undergraduate Computer Vision (16-385) at CMU. His research spans robotics, AI, and human-centered computing, with a focus on first-person vision and assistive technologies.