Martial Hebert
Director, Robotics Institute, First Child Designs

Martial Hebert is the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, a department in the School of Computer Science. A leading researcher in computer vision and robotics, Martial joined the faculty of the Robotics Institute in 1984, just five years after its founding. The Robotics Institute has since grown into the world’s largest robotics academic robotics research center, with an annual expenditures of over $85 million. Martial played a role in such high-profile projects as a pioneering program for self-driving vehicles. His research interests include computer vision, especially recognition in images and video data; model building and object recognition from 3D data; and perception for mobile robots and intelligent vehicles. In the area of machine perception for robotics, his group has developed techniques for people detection, tracking and prediction, and for understanding the environment of ground vehicles from sensor data. Martial has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and the International Journal of Computer Vision, for which he serves as editor-in-chief. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Paris.