Raquel Urtasun is a professor at the University of Toronto. Urtasun uses artificial intelligence, particularly

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

, to make vehicles and other machines perceive the world more accurately and efficiently.

Education

Urtasun received her bachelor's degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000 and her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006. Afterward, she was a postdoctoral scholar with Trevor Darrell, initially at MIT (2006–2008) and then, following Darrell's move to the International Computer Science Institute, at UC Berkeley (2008–2009).

Career

Professor Urtasun's area of research is machine perception for self-driving cars. This work includes machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing. She was previously an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) (2009–2014) and a visiting professor at

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

(2010). In May 2017, Uber hired Urtasun to lead a Toronto-based research team on self-driving cars. There, she led a research group in Uber's Advanced Technologies Group. Uber hired dozens of researchers and also made a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment to Toronto's Vector Institute, which Urtasun co-founded. She worked for the University of Toronto one day per week and for Uber four days per week. She brought eight students with her. In 2021, Urtasun left Uber and launched Waabi Innovation, focused on developing self-driving cars.

Awards and honours

Among Urtasun's awards are an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, 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

NeurIPS The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meet ...

, UAI, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, and ECCV. She was selected as one of the

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Women of the Year 2018.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Urtasun, Raquel Canadian women academics University of Toronto faculty Spanish women academics Spanish emigrants to Canada Living people Year of birth missing (living people) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne alumni