Stefano Soatto

Soatto obtained his D. Eng. in Electrical Engineering Cum Laude from the University of Padova in 1992, was an EAP Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in 1990-91, and received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California institute of Technology in 1996 with dissertation “A Geometric Approach to Dynamic Vision”. In 1996-97 he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University, and subsequently held positions as Assistant and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University, St. Louis, and of Mathematics and Information Science at the University of Udine, Italy. He has been at UCLA since 2000.

Soatto’s research focuses on Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Robotics. He co-developed optimal algorithms for Structure From Motion (SFM, or Visual SLAM, simultaneous localization and mapping, in Robotics; Best Paper Award at CVPR 1998), characterized its ambiguities (David Marr Prize at ICCV 1999), also characterized the identifiability and observability of visual-inertial sensor fusion (Best Paper Award at ICRA 2015). His research focus is the development of representations, that are functions of the data that capture their informative content and discard irrelevant variability in the data (a generalized form of ‘noise’ or ‘clutter’). Soatto’s lab first to demonstrate real-time SFM and Augmented Reality (AR) on commodity hardware in live demos at CVPR 2000, ICCV 2001, and ECCV 2002. He also co-led the UCLA-Golem Team in the second DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles, with Emilio Frazzoli (co-founder of NuTonomy), and Amnon Shashua (co-founder of Mobileye).