Bio

Irfan Essa is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing (College of Computing) and an adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (College of Engineering). Currently, he is serving as the Director of Off Campus Initiatives for the College of Computing.

Essa works in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Computational Perception, Robotics and Computer Animation, Machine Learning, and Social Computing with potential impact on Computational Photography & Video, Image-based Modeling, and Rendering. His specific research interests are in Video Analysis and Synthesis and Activity and Behavior Recognition. He also works in the new area of Computational Journalism, especially in the analysis, interpretation, authoring, and synthesis of video. The goals of this research include building aware environments and supporting healthy living; recognizing and modeling human behaviors; empowering humans to effectively interact with each other, with media, and with technologies; and developing dynamic and generative representations of time-varying streams.

The author of more than 150 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues, Essa received an NSF CAREER Award and the College of Computing’s Junior and Senior Research Faculty Awards, Outstanding Teacher Award, Outstanding Mentor Award, the Institute’s Educational Innovation Award, and the Dean’s Award. He is also a recipient of GVU Center’s 15 years of Impact Award. Additionally, he was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow in 2011.

In 1996, Essa joined the Georgia Tech faculty after earning his MS (1990) and PhD (1994) degrees, and holding a research faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral research was in the area of Facial Recognition, Analysis, and Synthesis.