Raquel Urtasun
Founder and CEO, Waabi Innovation Inc.
Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Co-founder, Vector Institute for AI
Self-driving is one of the most exciting and important technologies of this generation. Once solved at scale, it will change the world as we know it. The industry has made meaningful progress, but commercial deployment is still limited by traditional approaches that don’t take full advantage of the power of AI, and are technically cumbersome and costly to scale. AI is our single greatest key to unlocking self-driving. In this talk, I will discuss our breakthrough AI-first approach — bringing the promise of self-driving closer to commercialization than ever before.
Biography: Raquel Urtasun, the Founder and CEO of Waabi Innovation Inc., a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI.
From 2017 to 2021 she was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG. From 2015 to 2017 she was a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with the University of Chicago. She was also a visiting professor at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010.
She received her Bachelor’s degree from Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000, her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006, and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley. She is a world-leading expert in AI for self-driving cars.
Her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics, AI and remote sensing. Her lab was selected as an NVIDIA NVAIL lab. She is a recipient of an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, two NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two NVIDIA Pioneer Research Awards, a Connaught New Researcher Award, a Fallona Family Research Award, and two Best Paper Runner up Prize awarded at CVPR in 2013 and 2017 respectively. She was also named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the Year, and 2018 Toronto’s top influencers by Adweek magazine.
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