Biography
Leonid Sigal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He was aarded Canada Research Chair (CRC II) in Computer Vision and Machine Learning and is a remote Faculty Member of the Vector Institute for AI in Toronto. In addition, he serve as an Academic Advisor to Borealis AI. Prior to this, from 2009 to 2017, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research, Pittsburgh and an Adjunct Faculty of Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto. He completed his Ph.D. at Brown University; received his B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Boston University (1999), his M.A. from Boston University (1999), and his M.S. from Brown University (2003). From 1999 to 2001, he worked as a senior vision engineer at Cognex Corporation, where he developed industrial vision applications for pattern analysis and verification.
His work received the Best Paper Awards at the IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision in 2015 and Articulate Motion and Deformable Objects Conference in 2006 and in 2012.
Leonid's research interests mainly lie in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics, but also borderline fields of psychology and humanoid robotics. He is particularly interested in statistical and machine learning models for problems of visual inference, understanding and reasoning; including language+vision, human motion analysis, activity recognition, object detection, scene understanding, representation learning, graphical models, probabilistic and hierarchical inference. He also enjoys cross disciplinary research that lays on the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics.
Curriculum Vitae
Download: [pdf].
Work Experience
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University of British Columbia Associate Professor (2017 - present) |
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Vector Institute Faculty Member (2018 - present) |
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Borealis AI Academic Advisor (2018 - present) |
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Carnegie Mellon University Adjunct Faculty in Robotics Institute (2012 - 2017) |
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Disney Research Senior Research Scientist (2014 - 2017) Research Scientist (2010 - 2013) Postdoctoral Associate (2009 - 2010) |
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University of Toronto Postdoctoral Researcher (2007 - 2009) |
Education
 | Brown University Ph.D., Computer Science, 2008 Sc.M, Computer Science, 2003 |
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 | Boston University M.A., Computer Science, 1999 B.A., Computer Science, 1999 B.A., Mathematics, 1999 |
Honors and Awards
- Best Paper Award IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, for "Family Member Identification from Photo Collections", Qieyun Dai, Peter Carr, Leonid Sigal and Derek Hoiem, 2015.
- Best Paper Award, VII Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, for "Human Context: Modeling human-human interactions for monocular 3D pose estimation", Mykhaylo Andriluka and Leonid Sigal, 2012.
- Outstanding Reviewer Award, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2010
- Outstanding Reviewer Award, European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2008
- Outstanding Reviewer Award, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2008
- Best Paper Award, IV Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, for "Predicting 3D People from 2D Pictures", Leonid Sigal and Michael J. Black, 2006
Professional Service
Editorial
- Editor (with Thomas Moeslund, Adrian Hilton, Volker Krueger), Guide to Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People, Springer (2011).
- Guest Editor (with Michael J. Black), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), Special Issue on Evaluation of Human Motion and Pose Estimation (Vol. 87(1-2), March, 2010).
- Member of Editorial Board, Elsevier Computer Vision and Image Understanding.
- Member of Editorial Board, IET Computer Vision.
- Member of Editorial Board, International Journal of Computer Vision & Signal Processing.
- Member of Editorial Advisory Board, The Open Artificial Intelligence Journal, Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.
Program Chair or Organizer
- Co-Organizer, 2nd Workshop on Storytelling with Images and Videos (VisStory), in conjunction with European Conference on Computer Vision, October, 2016. Co-Organizer, Closing the Loop Between Vision and Language, in conjunction with International Conference on Computer Vision, December, 2015.
- Co-Organizer, 1st Workshop on Storytelling with Images and Videos (VisStory), in conjunction with European Conference on Computer Vision, September 2014.
- Organizer, 2nd Tutorial on Looking at People: The past, the present and the future, in conjunction with IEEE International Comference on Computer Vision (CVPR), June, 2012.
- Organizer, 1st Tutorial on Looking at People: The past, the present and the future, in conjunction with IEEE International Comference on Computer Vision (ICCV), November, 2011.
- Co-Organizer, HM2010: 3rd Workshop on Human Motion Understanding, Modeling, Capture and Animation, in conjunction with European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September, 2010.
- Co-Organizer, Totorial on Physics-Based Human Motion Modelling for People Tracking, in conjunction with IEEE International Comference on Computer Vision (ICCV), September, 2009.
- Organizer, EHuM: Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation Workshop, in conjunction with Neural Information and Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2006.
- Organizer, EHuM2: 2nd Workshop on Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation, in conjunction with IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2007.
Area Chair
- IEEE International Comference on Computer Vision (2019)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (2018)
- Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (2017)
- International Conference on Computer Vision (2015)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (2014)
- IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (2013)