Presenter

Yaser Sheikh is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute (on leave), Carnegie Mellon University, with appointments in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He founded and directs Facebook Reality Lab in Pittsburgh focused on pursuing "metric telepresence": remote interactions in AR/VR that are indistinguishable from reality. He has won Popular Science’s Best of What’s New Award, the Honda Initiation Award (2010), best paper awards at WACV (2012), SAP (2012), SCA (2010), and ICCV THEMIS (2009), and placed first in the MSCOCO Keypoint Challenge (2016); he received the Hillman Fellowship for Excellence in Computer Science Research (2004). Yaser has served as a senior committee member at leading conferences in computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics including SIGGRAPH (2013, 2014), CVPR (2014, 2015), ICRA (2014, 2016), ICCP (2011), and served as an Associate Editor of CVIU. His research is sponsored by various government research offices, including NSF and DARPA, and several industrial partners including the Intel Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Nissan, Honda, Toyota, and the Samsung Group. His research has been featured by various media outlets including The New York Times, The Verge, Popular Science, BBC, MSNBC, New Scientist, slashdot, and WIRED. He received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Central Florida advised by Prof. Mubarak Shah, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2008 at Carnegie Mellon University under the mentorship of Takeo Kanade. He received his BS degree from the Ghulam Ishaq Institute of Engineering Science and Technology in 2001.