Biography
Leonid Sigal was born on May 23, 1977 in Kiev, Ukraine. He ia a Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh, in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to this he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto. He completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Michael J. Black at Brown University; he received his B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Boston University (1999), his M.A. from Boston University (1999), and his M.S. from Brown University (2003). From 1999 to 2001, he worked as a senior vision engineer at Cognex Corporation, where he developed industrial vision applications for pattern analysis and verification. In 2002, he spent a semester as a research intern at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) working with Dorin Comaniciu on autonomous obstacle detection and avoidance for vehicle navigation. During the summers of 2005 and 2006, he worked as a research intern at Intel Applications Research Lab (ARL) on human pose estimation and tracking. His work received the Best Paper Award at the Articulate Motion and Deformable Objects Conference in 2006 (with Prof. Michael J. Black).
Leonid's research interests mainly lie in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics, but also borderline fields of psychology and humanoid robotics. He is particularly interested in statistical models for problems of visual inference, including human motion analysis, graphical models, probabilistic and hierarchical inference. He enjoys cross disciplinary research that lays on the fringe of computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics. For example, in applying machine learning techniques to solve problems in character animation and retargeting; or using physics-based models developed for motion synthesis and animation as priors for visual inference of pose.
Curriculum Vitae
Download: [postscript], [pdf].
Work Experience
- Disney Research, Pittsburgh, Research Scientist (2010 - present)
- Disney Research, Postdoctoral Associate (2009 - 2010)
- University of Toronto, Postdoctoral Researcher (2007 - 2009)
Education
- Brown University, Ph.D., Computer Science, 2008.
- Brown University, Sc.M, Computer Science, 2003.
- Boston University, M.A., Computer Science, 1999.
- Boston University, B.A., Computer Science, 1999.
- Boston University, B.A., Mathematics, 1999.
Honors and Awards
- Outstanding Reviewer Award, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2010
- Outstanding Reviewer Award, European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2008
- Outstanding Reviewer Award, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2008
- Best Paper Award, IV Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, for "Predicting 3D People from 2D Pictures" (jointly with Michael J. Black)
- Dissertation Fellowship, Brown University, 2006
- Deans Fellowship, Brown University, 2001/2002
- United States Achievement Award, 1996
Teaching
- Instructor, CSCD18 - Computer Graphics, Fall 2008 (at University of Toronto, Scarborough)
- Instructor, CSCD18 - Computer Graphics, Fall 2007 (at University of Toronto, Scarborough)
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, Fall 2005 (Brown University)
- Teaching Assistant, 1997-1999 (Boston University)
Professional Service
Editorial
- Editor (with Thomas Moeslund, Adrian Hilton, Volker Krueger), Guide to Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People, Springer (2011).
- Guest Editor (with Michael J. Black), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), Special Issue on Evaluation of Human Motion and Pose Estimation (Vol. 87(1-2), March, 2010).
- Member of Editorial Advisory Board, The Open Artificial Intelligence Journal, Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.
Program Chair or Organizer
- Organizer, Looking at People: The past, the present and the future, in conjunction with IEEE International Comference on Computer Vision (ICCV), November, 2011.
- Organizer, HM2010: 3rd Workshop on Human Motion Understanding, Modeling, Capture and Animation, in conjunction with European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September, 2010.
- Organizer, Totorial on Physics-Based Human Motion Modelling for People Tracking, in conjunction with IEEE International Comference on Computer Vision (ICCV), September, 2009.
- Organizer, EHuM: Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation Workshop, in conjunction with Neural Information and Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2006.
- Organizer, EHuM2: 2nd Workshop on Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation, in conjunction with IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2007.
Program Committee
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2007 - 2010)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (2008, 2010)
- IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (2007, 2009)
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2009)
- International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (2009)
- Workshop on Person-Oriented Vision (2011)
Member of the ACM, the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society.
Students Advised
Ph.D. Committees
- Dennis Levin Herzog, 2011, "Parametric Human Movements - Learning, Synthesis, Recognition, and Tracking", Prof. Volker Krüger, Aalborg University
- Marek Vondrak, TBD, Prof. Chad Jenkins, Brown University
Master's Students
- Thomas Balling Sørensen, 2010/11, "Animal detection and Action Recognition Using Histograms of Oriented Gradients and dense Optical Flow", Prof. Thomas B. Moeslund, Aalborg University
- Henrik Møss Christoffersen, 2010/11, "Animal detection and Action Recognition Using Histograms of Oriented Gradients and dense Optical Flow", Prof. Thomas B. Moeslund, Aalborg University
- Alexander Wong, 2008-2010,"Examination of a Hierarchical Model Derived from Statistical Co-occurrences", Prof. David Fleet, University of Toronto
Student Interns
- Peng Guan, 2011, Brown University
- Hyun Soo Park, 2011, CMU (jointly with Yaser Sheikh)
- Tian Lan, 2011, Simon Fraser University
- Syed Raza, 2011, Gorgia Tech (jointly with Ivan Poupyrev)
- Mykhaylo Andriluka, 2010/11, TU Darmstadt
- Marek Vondrak, 2010, Brown University
Reviewing
Reviewed journal papers for:
- Computer Vision and Image Understanding
- Expert Systems
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
- IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
- IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
- IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
- Image and Vision Computing Journal
- International Journal of Computer Vision
- International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence
- Journal of Computer Science and Technology
- Pattern Recognition
- The Visual Computer
Reviewed conference and workshop papers for:
- ACM SIGGRAPH: International Conference and Exhibition of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (2009)
- ACM SIGGRAPH Asia: Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia (2010)
- Asian Conference on Computer Vision (2009 - 2010)
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2004 - 2010)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (2004, 2008, 2010)
- IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (2005, 2007)
- IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (2003)
- International Conference on Pattern Recognition (2008)
- Neural Information Processing Systems (2007 - 2009)