Federico Tombari

Federico Tombari serves as Director of Research at Google Zurich and Lecturer (Privatdozent) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) within the School of Computation, Information and Technology. With 15+ years of experience, he leads applied computer vision and machine learning research across global offices while maintaining academic teaching and PhD supervision at TUM.

His research centers on 3D computer vision—including scene understanding, 3D object recognition, reconstruction, and SLAM—with critical applications in robotics, augmented reality, autonomous driving, and healthcare. Current explorations focus on unsupervised visual learning, Large Multimodal Models, Neural Radiance Fields, and scene graphs for embodied AI. As a core developer of the open-source Point Cloud Library (PCL), he bridges academic innovation and industrial deployment.

Key recognitions include:

• 2 Google Faculty Awards
• Amazon Research Award
• Outstanding Area Chair Award at ECCV 2024

Tombari has advised over 200 theses and secured 6M+ EUR in research funding (2015-2018) for his TUM team. His industry-academia collaborations span Google, Toyota, BMW, Audi, Zeiss, Amazon, and top global universities including Stanford, MIT, and ETH Zurich. At Google, he directs a 40+ member team that launched features for Lens, ARCore, and Bard.

He actively shapes the field through leadership roles as Area Chair for CVPR/NeurIPS/ECCV and Associate Editor for ICRA/IJRR, while driving innovation via co-founded ventures like Pointu3D GmbH (acquired by Google, 2019) and advisory roles at Fyusion/Apex.AI.