Yaser Sheikh

Yaser Sheikh is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (on leave) and Director of the Facebook Reality Lab, Pittsburgh. He holds appointments in the Mechanical Engineering Department and focuses on 'metric telepresence' for AR/VR interactions. His research spans machine perception, computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning, with applications in social behavior modeling and dynamic 3D reconstruction.

• University: Carnegie Mellon University
• Roles: Associate Professor (Robotics Institute), Director (Facebook Reality Lab)
• Contact: yaser@cs.cmu.edu, yasers@fb.com

Research Interests include:

• Computer Vision: Pose estimation, 3D reconstruction, camera calibration
• Computer Graphics: Face/Hand animation, photorealistic rendering
• Machine Learning: Neural rendering, unsupervised learning for landmark detection
• AR/VR: Telepresence, immersive social interactions

Notable Trends in Publications reveal a focus on real-time pose estimation (e.g., OpenPose), dynamic 3D reconstruction, and codec avatars for VR/AR. Recent works emphasize universal priors and neural rendering for photorealistic avatars.

Scientific Awards include:

• Popular Science’s Best of What’s New Award
• Honda Initiation Award (2010)
• Best Paper Awards: WACV (2012), SCA (2010), ICCV THEMIS (2009)
• Hillman Fellowship for Excellence in Computer Science Research (2004)

Advising and Grants: He has advised numerous PhD students (e.g., Hanbyul Joo, Tomas Simon) and received funding from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and industry partners like Intel, Disney, and Honda.

Labs & Teams: Leads the Facebook Reality Lab in Pittsburgh, collaborating with institutions like Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research.