Yaser Sheikh
Associate Professor, Robotics Institute
Courtesy Appointment, Mechanical Engineering
Yaser Sheikh is an associate professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, with appointments in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He also leads Oculus Research Pittsburgh, a Facebook lab focused on social VR. His research is focused on machine perception and rendering of social behavior, spanning sub-disciplines in computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. 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). Sheikh 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 Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Central Florida advised by 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.
Education
2006 Ph.D., Computer Science University of Central Florida
2005 MS, Computer Science University of Central Florida
2001 BS, Electronic Engineering Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology