Yaser Sheikh
I build frontier systems that enable machines to perceive and predict. I am currently a Consulting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the founder of a new AI venture in stealth, focused on foundational advances in long-horizon foresight.
Previously, I served as a Vice President at Meta (2015–2025), where I founded the Meta Reality Lab in Pittsburgh and led the invention and productization of Codec Avatars, a breakthrough in real-time, photorealistic telepresence that will usher in the next generation of global communication.
Before Meta, I spent over a decade as faculty at CMU’s Robotics Institute (2006–2019), where my group developed fundamental advances in machine perception, including OpenPose and the Panoptic Studio, systems that reshaped how AI understands human motion and behavior.