Raquel Urtasun
Raquel Urtasun is a Professor at the University of Toronto. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision in the Department of Computer Science. Urtasun uses artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, to make vehicles and other machines perceive the world more accurately and efficiently. In May 2017, Uber hired her to lead a Toronto-based research team for the company's self-driving car program. Education. 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. Career. 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 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 the other four for Uber. Urtasun 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, UAI, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, and ECCV. She was selected as one of the Chatelaine Women of the Year 2018.