Oisin Mac Aodha

Oisin Mac Aodha is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Machine Learning at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He is also an ELLIS Scholar and founder of the Turing interest group on biodiversity monitoring and forecasting, having previously served as a Turing Fellow from 2021-2025.

Mac Aodha completed his undergraduate degree in electronic engineering from the University of Galway in Ireland, followed by his MSc and PhD at University College London (UCL). His academic journey includes postdoctoral positions at UCL (2013-2016) working with Prof. Gabriel Brostow and Prof. Kate Jones, and at Caltech (2016-2019) in Prof. Pietro Perona's Computational Vision Lab as part of the Visipedia team.

His research centers on computer vision and machine learning with emphasis on 3D understanding, human-in-the-loop methods, and AI for conservation and biodiversity monitoring. He has made significant contributions to monocular depth estimation (including the influential Monodepth2 paper), fine-grained visual categorization, and biodiversity monitoring systems. His work bridges theoretical machine learning with practical ecological applications, developing tools for species identification, range estimation, and conservation efforts. Recent publications reveal a strong trend toward ecological applications while maintaining fundamental contributions to 3D vision and representation learning.

His major scientific achievements include:

• Turing Fellow (2021-2025)
• ELLIS Scholar
• Founder of the Turing interest group on biodiversity monitoring and forecasting
• Co-organizer of the Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) workshop series at major vision conferences

Mac Aodha advises multiple PhD students and postdocs working on computer vision for biodiversity monitoring, 3D understanding, and human-in-the-loop learning. His team has developed practical tools like Whombat (an open-source annotation tool for bioacoustics) and contributed to field-deployed biodiversity monitoring systems. He has served as Area Chair for top conferences including NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, and ICML, demonstrating his standing in the computer vision community.

His research group collaborates extensively with ecologists at University College London, particularly with Prof. Kate Jones' team, bridging machine learning expertise with ecological domain knowledge. The Vision at Edinburgh group he contributes to focuses on developing practical AI tools that address real-world conservation challenges while advancing fundamental computer vision research.