Pietro Perona

Pietro Perona is the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He holds a D.Eng. from the University of Padua (1985) and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (1990). His academic roles include serving as Director of the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering (1999–2004) and Executive Officer for Electrical Engineering (2006–2010).

His research focuses on computational vision, visual recognition, and machine learning. Key projects include the Visipedia initiative (smart apps for species identification like iNaturalist and Merlin Bird ID) and collaborations on neuroethology with Professors Anderson and Dickinson, studying fruit fly and mouse behavior. He also explores human visual perception and crowd-sourced learning.

Perona has been recognized as an IEEE Fellow and leads the Caltech Vision Lab, which develops machine vision systems for applications in conservation, robotics, and neuroscience. His lab’s work spans foundational research to real-world tools, including datasets like the Caltech Fish Counting Dataset and MABe22 benchmarks.

He teaches courses on computational vision and has advised numerous projects in AI and robotics. Current collaborations include partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Disney on AI-driven solutions.