Raquel Urtasun is a professor at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

. Urtasun uses

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

, particularly deep learning, 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 École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

(EPFL) in 2006. Afterward, she was a postdoctoral scholar with

Trevor Darrell Trevor Jackson Darrell is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research on computer vision and machine learning and is one of the leading experts on topics such as deep learni ...

, initially at MIT (2006–2008) and then, following Darrell's move to the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

, 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 Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC or TTI-Chicago) is a private graduate college and research institute focused on computer science and located in Chicago, Illinois within the University of Chicago campus. It is supported by the ear ...

(TTIC) (2009–2014) and a visiting professor at ETH Zurich (2010). In May 2017,

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), packa ...

hired Urtasun to lead a Toronto-based research team on

self-driving car A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input.Xie, S.; Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Ding, Z.; Arvin, F.,Distributed Motion Planning for S ...

s. 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 The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

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 The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) is an annual conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, which is regarded as one of the most important conferences in its field. According to Google Scholar Metrics (202 ...

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 The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artifici ...

, ICLR,

, and

ECCV The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) is a biennial research conference with the proceedings published by Springer Science+Business Media. Similar to ICCV in scope and quality, it is held those years which ICCV is not. It is considere ...

. She was selected as one of the Chatelaine 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