Raquel Urtasun

Raquel Urtasun is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. She is also the Founder and CEO of Waabi, an autonomous vehicle company. Previously, she was Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG (2017–2021) and held faculty positions at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) and as a visiting professor at ETH Zurich. Her research spans machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and AI with a strong focus on autonomous driving and 3D perception.

Education:

• Bachelor's degree, Universidad Pública de Navarra, 2000
• Ph.D., Computer Science, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 2006
• Postdoctoral studies, MIT and UC Berkeley

Raquel Urtasun's research focuses on developing AI systems for self-driving cars, emphasizing efficient perception using minimal sensors. Her work includes 3D scene understanding, stereo vision, optical flow, semantic segmentation, and object detection. She has developed the KITTI benchmark suite, widely used in autonomous driving research. Her lab is an NVIDIA NVAIL lab, reflecting its leadership in AI innovation.

Her recent publications show a consistent trend in deep learning for visual perception, particularly in stereo matching, optical flow, 3D object detection, and semantic segmentation. These works integrate deep neural networks with structured models like CRFs and MRFs, pushing the boundaries of accuracy and efficiency in scene understanding for autonomous systems.

Scientific Awards:

• NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship
• NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award
• Google Faculty Research Awards (multiple)
• Amazon Faculty Research Award
• Connaught New Researcher Award
• Fallona Family Research Award
• Best Paper Runner Up at CVPR 2013 and 2017
• UPNA Alumni Award
• Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the Year
• Adweek 2018 Toronto's Top Influencers

Urtasun has advised numerous PhD and Master’s students, many of whom now hold faculty or research scientist positions at institutions like UIUC, NYU, UBC, MIT, and companies including Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, and Apple. She has secured significant research grants from NSERC, Google, Amazon, and NVIDIA. Her leadership extends to organizing workshops and serving as Area Chair and Program Chair at top conferences like CVPR, ICML, and NeurIPS.

Labs and Teams: She leads a research group at the University of Toronto focused on AI for autonomous systems. Her team has been recognized as an NVIDIA NVAIL lab, and she continues to mentor students and postdocs working on cutting-edge problems in robotics and machine learning, both at UofT and through her company Waabi.