Isola and Torralba receive CVPR career awards

Antonio and Phillip

Last week it was announced that MIT EECS professors Phillip Isola and Antonio Torralba received career awards at the 2021 The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 

Isola was awarded one of the two Young Researcher Awards, which are given annually for the top researchers in computer vision worldwide, within 7 years of their PhD.

Torralba received the inaugural Thomas Huang Memorial Prize, in honor of researchers who are recognized as examples in research, teaching/mentoring and service to the computer vision community. The award is given in memory of the late Prof. Thomas S. Huang, a pioneering scholar who left deep impressions in multiple fields including computer vision and image processing. 

Isola is the Bonnie and Marty (1964) Tenenbaum Career Development Assistant Professor of EECS, where his research group (part of the broader Embodied Intelligence and Visual Computing community at MIT) focuses on computer vision, machine learning, and AI, particularly the applications and mis-applications of representation learning, generative modeling, and multiagent systems.

Isola received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Yale University and a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT advised by Ted Adelson, where he studied visual intelligence from the perspective of both minds and machines. He was a postdoctoral scholar with Alyosha Efros at UC-Berkeley before spending a year as a visiting research scientist at OpenAI. He received a National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellowship as well as an NSF postdoctoral fellowship; he joined MIT EECS as an assistant professor in July 2018.

Torralba is a CSAIL principal investigator, EECS Delta Electronics Professor, and head of the AI&D Faculty in the EECS department. His research areas are in computer vision, machine learning and human visual perception.

He received the degree in telecommunications engineering from Telecom BCN, Spain in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree in signal, image, and speech processing from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France in 2000. From 2000 to 2005, he spent postdoctoral training at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, where he is now a professor.