Raquel Urtasun

Raquel Urtasun is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and Founder & CEO of Waabi, a leading AI-driven autonomous driving company. She is also a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Her research focuses on machine learning, computer vision, and robotics, with a particular emphasis on self-driving cars and remote sensing. Urtasun holds a Ph.D. from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and has held roles including Chief Scientist at Uber ATG and visiting professorships at ETH Zurich and MIT.

Education:

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Universidad Pública de Navarra (2000)
• Ph.D. in Computer Science, EPFL (2006)
• Postdoctoral research at MIT and UC Berkeley

Research Interests: Her work bridges theoretical machine learning with practical applications in autonomous systems. Key areas include deep structured models, end-to-end learning for perception, and scalable optimization for real-time systems. She is known for developing the KITTI benchmark for autonomous vehicle evaluation, which became a global standard.

Articles Trends: Recent publications emphasize multi-modal fusion, efficient neural architectures, and robust uncertainty estimation for autonomous systems. Her work at CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV conferences highlights advancements in 3D scene understanding and decision-making under uncertainty.

Awards:

• NSERC EWR Steacie Fellowship (2017)
• NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award (2016)
• Three Google Faculty Research Awards
• UPNA Alumni Award (2018)
• Chatelaine Woman of the Year (2018)

Advising & Grants: Supervises over 20 graduate students and has led major projects funded by NSERC, NVIDIA, and industry partners. Her lab has been an NVIDIA NVAIL member and received grants from the Ministry of Research & Innovation and Connaught Foundation.

Labs & Teams: Leads the Urtasun Lab at UofT, collaborating with Waabi and the Vector Institute. Teams focus on interdisciplinary projects combining AI, robotics, and large-scale data systems.