Kris M. Kitani

Kris M. Kitani is an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and a Research Scientist at Meta's Artificial Intelligence division. He co-directs the Extended Reality Technology Center (XRTC) at CMU and holds courtesy appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at CMU and as a Guest Professor at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science.

• Education: BS in Electrical Engineering (University of Southern California), MS and PhD in Computer Science (University of Tokyo)
• Labs: Cognitive Assistance Laboratory

His research focuses on computer vision, human activity forecasting, and inverse reinforcement learning with applications in human-centered robotics and assistive technologies. Recent work explores 3D scene understanding, multi-modal sensing, and generative models for physical simulation. Publications analyze pedestrian interaction modeling, human pose estimation, and zero-shot learning for robotic applications.

Scientific Awards:

• Marr Prize Honorable Mention, ICCV 2017
• Best Paper Honorable Mentions at CHI 2017/2020
• Best Papers at W4A 2017/2019
• Best Application Paper, ACCV 2014

Kitani has advised 8 current PhD students and 18 past PhD/MSc students. He has taught graduate-level courses in Computer Vision and Statistical Techniques in Robotics since 2013. The lab develops autonomous systems for real-world perception and interactive decision-making.