Sanja Fidler

Sanja Fidler
Fidler speaking at a conference in 2025
Alma mater	University of Ljubljana (PhD, BSc)
Awards	Canada CIFAR AI Chair, Connaught New Researcher Award, NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award
Scientific career
Institutions	University of Toronto, NVIDIA
Thesis	Recognizing visual object categories with subspace methods and a learned hierarchical shape vocabulary  (2010)
Website	www.cs.utoronto.ca/~fidler/

Sanja Fidler is an associate professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Director of AI at NVIDIA. She is also a co-founder of the Vector Institute and CIFAR AI Chair. ^[1] Her research is in the areas of computer vision and artificial intelligence.

Education

Fidler attended the University of Ljubljana, where she received a BSc in Applied Mathematics in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2010. Following that she was a visiting scientist at UC Berkeley and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Toronto.

Career

Fidler's major research interests include 2D and 3D object detection, object segmentation and image labeling, and 3D scene understanding. ^[1] Several of her works have received popular press coverage, including a pop-song generator ^[2] and an algorithm to suggest fashion improvements. ^{[3] [4]}

Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she was an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). She became an assistant professor in 2014 in the Department of Mathematical & Computational Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she has held the role of associate professor since 2020.

In 2018, she was appointed a Director of AI at NVIDIA, ^{[5] [6]} having been hired by Jensen Huang to lead its Toronto research lab. ^[7]

Awards

Among Fidler's awards are the Connaught New Researcher Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, Amazon Academic Research Award, and Facebook Faculty Award. She served as Program Chair of ICCV 2021. She has also served as Area Chair of several machine learning and vision conferences including NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV.

References

1. "Sanja Fidler Home Page". University of Toronto. Retrieved 2020-03-07.
2. Sample, Ian (29 November 2016). "It's no Christmas No 1, but AI-generated song brings festive cheer to researchers". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 March 2020.
3. "New Algorithm for Instagram Will Tell You How to Dress Better". Harper's Bazaar. 21 June 2015. Retrieved 7 March 2020.
4. "This algorithm just solved fashion". Wired.
5. "U of T computer vision expert to lead new Nvidia research lab in Toronto". University of Toronto. Retrieved 7 March 2020.
6. "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls Canada's AI talent 'incredible,' a key resource". University of Toronto. Retrieved 7 March 2020.
7. O'Connor, Joe (26 April 2024). "Meet Nvidia's Canadian secret weapon". Financial Post. Retrieved 30 September 2024.