Professor Marios Savvides is the Bossa Nova Robotics Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University, he is the Founding and Director of the Biometrics Center at CMU CyLab and also Bossa Nova Robotics Chief AI Scientist. He received his Bachelor of Engineering in Microelectronics Systems Engineering from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1997 in the United Kingdom, his Master of Science in Robotics from the Robotics Institute in 2000 and his PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at CMU in 2004.
His recent work includes hand detection on steering wheels in natural challenging driving conditions, which ranked first in the Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Applications competition. His latest work can detect heavily occluded faces under very challenging real-world conditions.
His achievements also include leading the R&D in CMU’s participation in NIST’s Open Face Recognition Grand Challenge 2005, where the CMU team ranked first in both Academia and Industry. Professor Savvides and his team also participated in NIST’s Iris Challenge Evaluation in 2005, where the CMU team came in first in Academia and second against commercial vendors. He was the only academic to participate in both worldwide competitions. Professor Savvides was chosen as one of four researchers to form the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s first Center of Academic Excellence in Science and Technology in the area of biometrics and advanced algorithm development.
Professor Savvides spun off a startup called HawXeye with one of his former students where he served as CTO. HawXeye developed efficient, fast, low-form factor AI algorithms making current generation of home security cameras smarter. There are currently over one million home security cameras employing this technology.
He served as the Vice President of Education for the IEEE Biometric Council in 2015-2016 and as chair or a member of the technical committee of many conferences. He also served on the main steering committee and helped co-develop the IEEE Certified Biometrics Professional program.
He has raised over $40 million in research contracts. He has authored and co-authored over 240 journal and conference publications, including 22 book chapters and served as the area editor of the Springer’s Encyclopedia of Biometrics. He is a recipient of seven Best Paper awards, has filed over 55 patents and his work in facial recognition was presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2018. His work has been featured in over 100 news media articles. He is the recipient of CMU’s 2009 Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) Outstanding Research Award, the Gold Award in the 2015 Edison Awards in Applied Technologies and the CMU Bossa Nova Robotics Endowed Chair Professorship of Artificial Intelligence 2018.
