Raquel Urtasun

Urtasun's bachelor's degree is from Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000 and her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Following that she was a postdoctoral scholar at both MIT and UC Berkeley.

Professor Urtasun's area of research is machine perception for self-driving cars. This work entails include machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing. Before taking up her current role at the University of Toronto, she was an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) and briefly served as a visiting professor at ETH Zurich in 2010.

At Uber Urtasun will lead a research hub called the Advanced Technologies Group. Uber will hire dozens of researchers and also make a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment to Toronto’s Vector Institute, which Urtasun co-founded. She will work for the University of Toronto one day per week and the other four for Uber. Urtasun is bringing eight students with her, and Uber says it hopes to attract other talent from the region.

Among Urtasun's awards are an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award. She is the recipient of Faculty Research Awards from both Amazon and Google, the latter three times. She served as Program Chair of CVPR 2018, and is an Editor of the International Journal in Computer Vision (IJCV). She has also served as Area Chair of several machine learning and vision conferences including NIPS, UAI, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, and ECCV.