Serge Belongie

Serge Belongie is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, where he also serves as Associate Dean. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision and machine learning, specifically object recognition and image segmentation, with his scientific research in these areas cited over 50,000 times according to Google Scholar. Along with Jitendra Malik, Belongie proposed the concept of Shape context, a widely used feature descriptor in object recognition. He has co-founded several startups in the areas of computer vision and object recognition.

Career

Belongie received a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from University of California, Berkeley in 2000, where he was advised by computer scientist Jitendra Malik.

While an undergraduate student at California Institute of Technology, Belongie co-founded Digital Persona, Inc., which created what has been called "the world's first mass-market fingerprint identification device". Digital Persona was acquired by biometric identification company Crossmatch, Inc in 2014. He has also been the co-founder of image recognition startup Anchovi Labs (acquired by Dropbox, Inc. in 2012), and computer vision/video analysis company Orpix, Inc. He is also an Expert in Residence at LDV Capital. Belongie is the creator, along with Pietro Perona, of Visipedia, an image recognition platform that promises to combine computer and human capabilities to allow users to identify and annotate images.

Belongie was a professor of Computer Science at University of California, San Diego between 2001 and 2013, and held several other faculty positions before joining Cornell Tech as a professor in 2014. At Cornell, he is the director of the SE(3) Computer Vision Group, and a member of the Connected Experiences Laboratory.

Awards

The MIT Technology Review named Belongie to their list of Innovators under 35 for 2004. In 2007, Belongie and his co-authors received a Marr Prize Honorable mention for a paper presented at International Conference on Computer Vision. In 2015, he was the recipient of the ICCV Helmholtz Prize, awarded to authors of papers that have made fundamental contributions to the field of computer vision. Belongie also received an NSF Career Award and a Sloan Research Fellowship to support his research.