Faculty Irfan Essa

Irfan Essa

Professor
School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Member of GVU Center and RIM Center

Areas of Expertise
  • Computational Video
  • Computational Photography
  • Computational Journalism
  • Computational Media
  • Computational Perception

Best Way to Contact:
E-mail: irfan@cc.gatech.edu
You may also contact Jason Maderer at the numbers above.

Irfan Essa is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing, and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

For the academic year 2008-2009, Essa was also affiliated with the newly formed Disney Research Lab in Pittsburgh as a visiting scientist/consultant (a role he continues in 2009-2010). During that time, he was also an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.

Essa works in the areas of computer vision, computer graphics, computational perception, robotics and computer animation, with potential impact on video analysis and production, human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence research. Specifically, he is interested in the analysis, interpretation, authoring and synthesis (of video), with the goals of building aware environments, recognizing, modeling human activities and behaviors, and developing dynamic and generative representations of time-varying streams. He has published more than100 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on these topics.

He teaches classes in the areas of computer vision, computational perception, computer animation, digital video special effects and computational journalism.

At Georgia Tech, he is primarily affiliated with two interdepartmental centers: the Robotics & Machine Intelligence (RIM@GT) Center and the GVU Center. He founded the Computational Perception Laboratory at Georgia Tech in 1996, which he now co-directs with four other faculty members. He is also a founding member of the Aware Home Research Initiative and the Collaborative Adaptive Believable Agents Lab. He also started an effort on digital video special effects and animation and computational journalism. He helped establish a new bachelor's degree in Computational Media, is affiliated with the new Ph.D. program in human-centered computing and is involved with the new Initiatives in Robotics at GeorgiaTech (including a new Ph.D. in Robotics).

More information about Essa's work can be found at: http://prof.irfanessa.com/