Irfan Essa is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Interactive Computing (IC) in the College of Computing (CoC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He is the Executive Director of the new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT), which he founded in 2015. He joined GA Tech Faculty in 1996. He has held many administrative positions at Georgia Tech, including Associate Dean and Senior Associate Dean of the College of Computing, and Interim Director of the AI-Hub. He is also a core member of several interdisciplinary research centers and Institutes.
Irfan Essa is also a Principal Research Scientist and Research Director at Google Inc.’s DeepMind. He leads the Google Atlanta Research Office, which he established in 2019. He joined Google in 2011 and led the project on Video Stabilization for YouTube. His most recent project at Google was the Wizard of Oz at the Sphere in Las Vegas. He and his team were awarded the Visual Effects Society’s Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project in 2026.
Irfan works in the areas of Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Graphics, Computational Perception, Robotics, Computer Animation, and Social Computing, with potential impact on Autonomous Systems, Video Analysis, and Production (e.g., Computational Photography & Video, Image-based Modeling and Rendering, etc.), Intelligent and Aware Environments, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Behavioral/Social Sciences, and Computational Journalism research. He has published over 250 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on these topics, and several of his papers have also won best paper awards. He was awarded the NSF CAREER award and elected to be an IEEE Fellow. He has held extended research consulting positions with Disney Research and Google Research and also was an Adjunct Faculty Member at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.
He earned his SM (1990) and Ph.D. (1994) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and held a Research Faculty position at the MIT Media Lab from 1994 to 1996.
A few selected pictures from over the years!
