Ivan Laptev

Prior to joining MBZUAI , Professor Laptev obtained his master's degree in computer science at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden in 1997 and then worked as a research assistant at the Technical University of Munich. In 2004, he earned his Ph.D. in computer science from KTH and pursued a postdoc position at the INRIA Vista team in France. He was appointed as INRIA Research Scientist in 2005 and then as INRIA Research Director in 2013.

Professor Laptev has been with INRIA Paris since 2009, where he has led the WILLOW research team between 2021 and 2023. He has published more than 150 technical papers, most of which appeared in international journals and major peer-reviewed conferences of computer vision, machine learning and robotics. He has graduated 19 Ph.D. students who now pursue careers in industrial and academic research labs.

Professor Laptev has also co-founded a computer vision company, VisionLabs, which has grown to 250 people. Laptev has been actively involved in the scientific community, serving as an associate editor of IJCV and TPAMI, and as a program chair for CVPR 2018, ICCV 2023 and ACCV 2024. He will also serve as a General Chair of ICCV 2029 bringing the international computer vision community to UAE. Professor Laptve has co-organized several tutorials, workshops and challenges at major computer vision conferences.

He has also co-organized a series of INRIA summer schools on computer vision and machine learning (2010–2013) and Machines Can See summits (2017–2023). He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2012 and was awarded a Helmholtz prize for significant impact on computer vision in 2017.

• Postdoc in computer vision from INRIA, Rennes, France
• Ph.D. in computer vision from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm
• M.Sc. in computer science from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm

• Helmholtz prize for significant impact on computer vision research, 2017
• Google Research Awards 2012, 2015
• ERC Junior grant, 2012
• INRIA award for outstanding research "Prime d’excellence scientifique", 2010
• Winner of the REVERIE/Soon Challenge, in conjunction with ICCV 2021
• First place in the Google Cloud & YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge, 2017
• Honorable mention in PASCAL VOC Challenge, 2007.

• Object Goal Navigation with Recursive Implicit Maps (2023), S. Chen, T. Chabal, I. Laptev and C. Schmid; In Proc. IROS'23.
• Vid2Seq: Large-scale pretraining of a visual language model for dense video captioning (2023), A. Yang, A. Nagrani, P.H. Seo, A. Miech, J. Pont-Tuset, I. Laptev, J. Sivic and C. Schmid; in Proc CVPR'23.
• Tackling ambiguity with images: Improved multimodal machine translation and contrastive evaluation (2023), M. Futeral, C. Schmid, I. Laptev, B. Sagot and R. Bawden; in Proc ACL'23.
• gSDF: Geometry-Driven Signed Distance Functions for 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction (2023), Z. Chen, S. Chen, C. Schmid and I. Laptev; in Proc CVPR'23.
• Language Conditioned Spatial Relation Reasoning for 3D Object Grounding (2022), S. Chen, P.-L. Guhur, M. Tapaswi, C. Schmid and I. Laptev; in Proc NeurIPS'22.
• Zero-Shot Video Question Answering via Frozen Bidirectional Language Models (2022), A. Yang, A. Miech, J. Sivic, I. Laptev and C. Schmid; in Proc NeurIPS'22.