Alexei (Alyosha) Efros: Curriculum Vitae

ALEXEI (ALYOSHA) EFROS
Curriculum Vitae

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Office: 225 Smith Hall
Office Phone: +1 (412) 268-1234
E-mail: efros@cs.cmu.edu
Home Page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~efros

EDUCATION

Ph.D in Computer Science, October 2003
Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D. Thesis: Data-driven Approaches for Texture and Motion
Research Advisor: Prof. Jitendra Malik

M.S. in Computer Science, December 1999
Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley

B.S. in Computer Science, summa cum laude, June 1997
Computer Science Department, University of Utah

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

2010 -- present Associate Professor, The Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

2004 -- 2010 Assistant Professor, The Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Fall 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, WILLOW Laboratory
Ecole Normale Superieure / INRIA, Paris, France

2003 -- 2004 Visiting Research Fellow, Robotics Research Group
University of Oxford, England

1998 -- 2003 Graduate Student Researcher, Computer Vision Research Group
University of California, Berkeley

1993 -- 1997 Research Assistant, Computer Science Department
University of Utah

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Carnegie Mellon University
16-824: Learning-based Methods in Vision (grad), Spring 2012
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Fall 2011, instructor rating: 4.6/5.0
16-899A: Pixels to Percepts: Human Visual Perception for Vision and Graphics (grad), Spring 2011, instructor rating: 4.3/5.0
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Fall 2010, instructor rating: 4.7/5.0
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Spring 2010, instructor rating: 4.7/5.0
16-721: Learning-based Methods in Vision (grad), Spring 2009, instructor rating: 4.4/5.0
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Fall 2008, instructor rating: 5.0/5.0
15-996: CSD Immigration Course (first year grad), Fall 2008
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Fall 2007, instructor rating: 4.9/5.0
15-462: Computational Graphics (undergrad), Fall 2007, instructor rating: 4.3/5.0
16-721: Learning-based Methods in Vision (grad), Spring 2007, instructor rating: 4.4/5.0
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Fall 2006, instructor rating: 5.0/5.0
16-721: Advanced Machine Perception (grad), Spring 2006, instructor rating: 4.6/5.0
15-463: Computational Photography (undergrad/grad), Fall 2005, instructor rating: 4.8/5.0
15-463: Rendering and Image Processing (undergrad), Fall 2004, instructor rating: 4.9/5.0
PUBLICATIONS
Refereed Conference Papers
- T. Malisiewicz, A. Gupta, A.A. Efros, ``Ensemble of Exemplar-SVMs for Object Detection and Beyond'', International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Barcelona, Nov 2011
- A. Gupta, S. Satkin, A.A. Efros, M. Hebert, ``From 3D Scene Geometry to Human Workspace'', Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Colorado Springs, June 2011
- A. Torralba, A.A. Efros, ``Unbiased Look at Dataset Bias'', Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Colorado Springs, June 2011
- A. Gupta, A.A. Efros, M. Hebert, ``Blocks World Revisited: Image Understanding using Qualitative Geometry and Mechanics'', European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Crete, Greece, September 2010 (Best Paper Honorable Mention)
- J-F Lalonde, A.A. Efros, S.G. Narasimhan, ``Detecting Ground Shadows in Outdoor Consumer Photographs'', European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Crete, Greece, September 2010
- T. Malisiewicz, A.A. Efros, ``Beyond Categories: The Visual Memex Model for Reasoning About Object Relationships'', NIPS 2009, Vancouver, Canada, December 2009
- B. Russell, A.A. Efros, J. Sivic, B. Freeman, A. Zisserman, ``Segmenting Scenes by Matching Image Composites'', NIPS 2009, Vancouver, Canada, December 2009
- J-F Lalonde, A.A. Efros, S.G. Narasimhan, ``Estimating Natural Illumination from a Single Outdoor Image'', International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Kyoto, Japan, October 2009
- E. Kalogerakis, O. Vesselova, J. Hays, A.A. Efros, A. Hertzmann, ``Image Sequence Geolocation with Human Travel Priors'', International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Kyoto, Japan, October 2009
- S.K. Divvala, D. Hoiem, J. Hays, A.A. Efros, M. Hebert, ``An Empirical Study of Context in Object Detection'', Conference on Computer vision and Pattern ecognition (CVPR), Miami Beach, Florida, June 2009
- J-F Lalonde, S.G. Narasimhan, A.A. Efros, ``What Does the Sky Tell Us About the Camera?'', European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Marseille, France, October 2008
- J. Hays, A.A. Efros, ``im2gps: estimating geographic information from a single image'', Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Anchorage, Alaska, June 2008
- T. Malisiewicz, A.A. Efros , ``Recognition by Association via Learning per-exemplar Distances'', Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Anchorage, Alaska, June 2008
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, M. Hebert, ``Closing the Loop on Scene Interpretation'', Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Anchorage, Alaska, June 2008
- J. Sivic, B.C. Russell, A. Zisserman, W.T. Freeman, A.A. Efros, ``Unsupervised Discovery of Object Hierarchies'', Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Anchorage, Alaska, June 2008
- D. Hoiem, A. Stein, A.A. Efros, M. Hebert, ``Recovering Occlusion Boundaries from a Single Image'', IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Rio de Janeiro, October 2007.
- J.-F. Lalonde, A.A. Efros, ``Using Color Compatibility for Assessing Image Realism'', IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Rio de Janeiro, October 2007.
- T. Malisiewicz, A.A. Efros, ``Improving Spatial Support for Objects via Multiple Segmentations'', British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC 2007) , September 2007.
- B. Nabbe, D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, M. Hebert, ``Opportunistic use of vision to push back the path planning horizon'', IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Beijing, October 2006.
- B.C. Russell, A.A. Efros, J. Sivic, A. Zisserman, W. T. Freeman, ``Using Multiple Segmentations to Discover Objects and their Extent in Image Collections'', IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New York, June 2006.
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, ``Putting Objects in Perspective'', IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New York, June 2006. (Best Paper Award)
- J. Hays, M. Leordeanu, A.A. Efros, Y. Liu, ``Discovering Texture Regularity as a Higher-Order Correspondence Problem'', European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Graz, Austria, May 2006.
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, ``Geometric Context from a Single Image'', IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Beijing, October 2005.
- J. Sivic, B.C. Russell, A.A. Efros, A. Zisserman, W. T. Freeman, ``Discovering objects and their localization in images'', IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Beijing, October 2005.
- A. A. Efros, V. Isler, J. Shi, M. Visontai, ``Seeing Through Water'', Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), vol 17, Vancouver, BC, December 2004.
- G. Mori, X. Ren, A. A. Efros, J. Malik, ``Recovering Human Body Configurations: Combining Segmentation and Recognition'', IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Washington DC, June 2004.
- A. A. Efros, A. C. Berg, G. Mori, J. Malik, ``Recognizing Action at a Distance,'', IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Nice, France, October 2003.
- A. A. Efros, W. T. Freeman, ``Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer'', Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 01, Los Angeles, August 2001. (over 1000 citations)
- A. A. Efros, T. K. Leung, ``Texture Synthesis by Non-parametric Sampling,'', IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Corfu, Greece, September 1999. (over 1500 citations)
Journal Articles
- C. Doersch, S. Singh, A. Gupta, J. Sivic, A.A. Efros, ``What makes Paris look like Paris?'', ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), conditionally accepted
- J.-F. Lalonde, A.A. Efros, S.G. Narasimhan, ``Estimating the Natural Illumination Conditions from a Single Outdoor Image'', International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol 98, no. 2, 2012
- A. Srivastava, T. Malisiewicz, A. Gupta, A.A. Efros, ``Data-driven Visual Similarity for Cross-domain Image Matching'', ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2011), 30(6), 2011
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, ``Recovering Occlusion Boundaries from an Image'', International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol 91, no. 3, 2011
- J.-F. Lalonde, S.G. Narasimhan, A.A. Efros, ``What Do the Sun and the Sky Tell Us About the Camera?'', International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol 88, no. 1, 2010
- J.-F. Lalonde, A.A. Efros, S.G. Narasimhan, ``Webcam Clip Art: Appearance and Illuminant Transfer from Time-lapse Sequences'', ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2009), 28(5), 2009
- J. Hays and A.A. Efros, ``Scene completion using millions of photographs'', Communications of the ACM, vol. 51, no. 10, October 2008
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, ``Putting Objects in Perspective'', International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol. 80, no. 1, October 2008
- M.H. Nguyen, J.-F. Lalonde, A.A. Efros, F. de la Torre. ``Image-based Shaving'', Computer Graphics Forum Journal (Eurographics 2008), 27(2), 2008.
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, ``Recovering Surface Layout from an Image'', International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol. 75, no. 1, October 2007
- J. Hays, A. A. Efros. ``Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs'', ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2007), August 2007, vol. 26, No. 3.
- J.-F. Lalonde, D. Hoiem, A. A. Efros, C. Rother, J. Winn, A. Criminisi. ``Photo Clip Art'', ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2007), August 2007, Vol 26. No. 3.
- D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, ``Automatic Photo Pop-up'', Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 05), July 2005
- L. Ren, A. Patrick, A.A. Efros, J. Hodgins, and J.M. Rehg, ``Quantifying Natural Human Motion'', Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 05), July 2005
- T. M. Sobh, M. Dekhil, A. A. Efros and R. Mihali, ``Logical Control for Mobile Robots,'' International Journal of Robotics & Automation, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2001.
- M. Dekhil, A. A. Efros, and T.M. Sobh, ``Commanding sensors and controlling indoor autonomous mobile robots,'' International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1999. (Originally published in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Control Applications, September 1996, pp.199-204.)
- T. M. Sobh, M. Dekhil, and A. A. Efros, ``Sensing Under Uncertainty for Mobile Robots,'' Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1999 (Originally published as book chapter in ASME Series on Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Volume 3, 1996.)
- T. C. Henderson, A. A. Efros, ``Evolutionary Teleomorphology,'' Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997.
Patents
- U.S. Patent Pending: System and Method for Generating 3D models from a single 2D image, filed Jan. 2007.
- U.S. Patent #7,785,180: Method, apparatus, and system for object recognition, object segmentation and knowledge acquisition, August 2010.
- U.S. Patent #6,919,903: Texture synthesis and transfer for pixel images, July 2005.
STUDENTS
- Current PhD Students: Santosh Kumar Divvala (co-advised with Martial Hebert); Carl Doersch; Daniel Maturana
- Graduated PhD Students:
  - Derek Hoiem (PhD 2007), now assistant professor at University of Illinois. Recipient of: CMU School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award and ACM Best Dissertation Honorable Mention.
  - James Hays (PhD 2009), now assistant professor at Brown University.
  - Jean-Francois Lalonde (PhD 2011), now research scientist at Tandent Vision. Recipient of CMU School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award.
  - Tomasz Malisiewicz (PhD 2011), now Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.
- Thesis Committee Service: Steve Lin (CSD, CMU, PhD 2005), Liu Ren (CSD, CMU, PhD 2006), Alexander Neubeck (ETH Zurich, PhD 2006), David Tinapple (Fine Arts, CMU, MFA 2007), Bryan Russell (MIT, PhD 2007), Jiang Ni (Robotics, CMU, PhD 2007), Andrew Stein (Robotics, CMU, PhD 2008), Yan Ke (CSD, CMU, PhD 2008), Caroline Pantofaru (Robotics, CMU, PhD 2008), Andrew Gallagher (ECE, CMU, PhD 2009), Sanjeev Koppal (Robotics, CMU, PhD 2009), Tom Stepleton (Robotics, CMU, PhD 2010), Elena Bernardis (UPenn, PhD 2011), David Lee (ECE, CMU, PhD 2011), Jenny Yuen (MIT, PhD 2011), Vladimir Nedovic (University of Amsterdam, PhD 2011), Yong Jae Lee (UTexas, PhD 2012).
SELECTED INVITED TALKS
- Invited Speaker, INRIA Recognition and Machine Learning Summer School, Grenoble (July 2012)
- Invited Speaker, Computational (Biological) Vision Summer School, Black Forest, Germany (June 2012)
- Keynote Speaker, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2012, Paris (June 2012)
- Invited Speaker, INRIA Recognition and Machine Learning Summer School, Paris (July 2011)
- Invited Planery Speaker, ICVGIP 2010, "What does it mean to `understand' an image?", Chennai, India (Dec 2010)
- Keynote Speaker, 3DPVT 2010, "Qualitative 3D", Paris, France (May 2010)
- Keynote Speaker, Eurographics 2010, "Large Online Image Collections as a Source of Visual Realism", Norrköping, Sweden (May 2010)
- Keynote Speaker, GraphiCon'09, "Using Data to Brute Force Hard Problems in Computational Photography", Moscow, Russia (Oct 2009)
- Keynote Speaker, British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC'09), "What can the world tell us about the image?", London, U.K. (Sept 2009)
- Invited Speaker, Rosenon Workshop, Recognition by Association: ask not "What is it?", ask "What is it like?", Stockholm archipelago, Sweden (August 2008)
- Invited Speaker, International Workshop on Computer Vision, "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the masses are biased and how this can be useful", Venice, Italy (May 2008)
- Invited Speaker, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08), "From Images to Scenes: using lots of data to infer geometric, photometric and semantic scene properties from a single image", Chicago (July 2008)
- Keynote Speaker, IMAGINA'08, "Using Data to ``Brute Force'' Hard Problems in Computational Photography", Monte Carlo, Monaco (Jan 2008)
- Invited Speaker, Scene Understanding Symposium (SUnS'07), "It's a 3D World: Toward a Qualitative 3D Representation of a Scene", Boston (Feb 2007)
- Invited Speaker, Emphasis week on Visual Recognition, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) "Geometric Context from a Single Image", Berkeley (March 2005)
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
- University Activity: CMU Faculty Senate (2006-2008); University Research Council (2006-2007); VASC Seminar Organizer (2005-2009); Robotics Institute Seminar Organizer (2006-2007)
- Educational:Co-organizer, ACM Utah High School Programming Contest, 1995-1997 (Designed take-home problems: Optical Character Recognition, CPU Simulation, BASIC interpreter)
- Organizational/Social: Co-organizer (with A. Torralba, T. Tuytelaars, C. Schmid), "Sicily" Workshop on Object Recognition, 2008; Poster Session and Local Arrangements Organizer, Convergence of Graphics, Vision, and Video Workshop, Berkeley, (March 2001); Co-organizer (with Pietro Perona), The "Vodka Tasting" Party, CVPR 2001, Hawaii (Dec 2001)
SELECTED HONORS
- SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2010)
- Finmeccanica Career Development Chair (2010-2012)
- Okawa Foundation Grant (2008)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2008-2009)
- Sloan Fellowship (2008-2010)
- Faculty Development Fellowship, School of Computer Science, CMU (2007-2009)
- CVPR Best Paper Award (2006)
- ``Cool Person Award'', Robotics Institute Student Organization (RoboOrg), CMU (2006)
- NSF CAREER Award (2006-2010)
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1997-2000)
- Barry Goldwater Scholar in Mathematics, Science and Engineering (1995-1997)
- University of Utah Honors at Entrance Scholarship (1993-1997)
- High School Summer Computing Institute Scholarship (1992-1996)
- 2nd Place, USSR National Young Programmer Contest, Krasnoyarsk, USSR (1989)
SELECTED PRESS COVERAGE
- Le Monde (Feb 25 print edition, 2012): De nouveaux yeux pour voir le monde
- TechCrunch (Dec 6, 2011): CMU Researchers One-Up Google Image Search And Photosynth With Visual Similarity Engine
- PBS NOVA (Feb 9, 2011): Getting Computers to See
- Science Daily (Sept 10, 2010): New Method Helps Computer Vision Systems Decipher Outdoor Scenes
- Computing Community Consortium (Nov 19, 2008): Algorithm Estimates Geographic Location of Photos
- CNET (June 18, 2008): New geotagging method draws on Flickr photos
- Aperture Magazine (no. 190, Spring 2008): Of Other Times and Places by Fred Ritchin
- The Independent (Sept 19, 2007): Instant makeup: Perfect your holiday snaps
- MSNBC (Sept 12, 2007): Software turns photos from bad to good
- BBC News (August 8, 2007): Photo tool could fix bad images
- USA Today (June 12, 2007): Researchers try Google photo tactic
- MIT Technology Review (April 27, 2007): A New Dimension for Your Photos
- The Economist (Dec 2, 2006): It All Depends on Your Point of View
- Photonics Spectra (August 2006): Synergy Improves Automated Scene Recognition
- Scientific Computing World (July/August 2005): The Colour of the Past
- YouTube: Transforming a 2D image into 3D (almost 2 million views)
- Slashdot: Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive 3D from 2D (2006), Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images (2007), and Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos (2008)
BIOGRAPHICAL
- Citizenship: dual U.S. and Russian
- Languages spoken: native Russian, fluent English, conversational French
- Hobbies: piano, classical guitar, kayaking, hiking, traveling, photography, pottery

2010 -- present	Associate Professor, The Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2004 -- 2010	Assistant Professor, The Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Fall 2009	Guggenheim Fellow, WILLOW Laboratory Ecole Normale Superieure / INRIA, Paris, France
2003 -- 2004	Visiting Research Fellow, Robotics Research Group University of Oxford, England
1998 -- 2003	Graduate Student Researcher, Computer Vision Research Group University of California, Berkeley
1993 -- 1997	Research Assistant, Computer Science Department University of Utah