A very short personal bio
Grew up, lived and studied in Athens until 2015, with short breaks like a semester in Lund, a summer in Barcelona and a few summers in California. Moved to California in January 2015. Lived in Hayes Valley, San Francisco from 2015 to late 2017, and then at the wonderful "Roots and Branches" co-op in Oakland till late 2019. Returned to Europe the long way, via the Amazon jungle, Ghana, Costa Rica and many other places. Lived in Grenoble, under the Alps, from mid 2020 till 2023, mostly during the pandemic years. Enjoyed the mountains but missed the sun and sea. Moved to Barcelona in 2023. Deeply grateful to be sharing a home with Amanda. Passionate about research, photography, filmaking, art, music, yoga, surfing and travelling.
A short research bio
I am currently working as a Principal Scientist at NAVER LABS Europe. I got my PhD in 2014 and I have been working at top-tier industrial reserch labs around the world since then. I have published scientific papers at all the top-tier venues of computer vision and AI (see the list of selected publications below, or visit my Google Scholar profile for a complete list and citation counts). A summary of my work experience follows:
- 2020 - now: Research scientist at Naver Labs Europe. Research on universal models for robotic perception, self-supervised representation learning, generalization and transfer learning, adaptation of large models with limited data/resources, multi-modal learning and some video understanding.
- 2017 - 2019: Research scientist at Facebook Research in Menlo Park. Research mostly focusing on video understanding, deep learning architecture modeling and vision and language.
- 2015 - 2017: Research scientist at Yahoo Research in San Francisco. Research powering the visual search feature on Flickr, collaborated with Stanford on the Visual Genome project, creating a dataset for modeling of vision and language.
- 2009 - 2014: PhD at the National Technical University of Athens on large-scale geometry indexing, nearest neighbor search and clustering. Supervised by Prof. Stefanos Kollias and Yannis Avrithis, working closely with my research brother Giorgos Tolias.
Socially impactful research: I am also very passionate about urging my research community tackle more socially impactful problems. I co-lead the Computer Vision for Global Challenges initative, and have organized the Computer Vision for Global Challenges workshop at CVPR 2019, and the Computer Vision for Agriculture (CV4A) workshop at ICLR 2020. I also co-led the organization of the Wiki-M3L 2022: Wikipedia and Multi-Modal & Multi-Lingual Research workshop at ICLR 2022. In 2024 I am helping co-organize the African Computer Vision Summer School (ACVSS) series. The inaugural occurrence was in Kenya, in July 2024.
Mentoring: I love to mentor students/younger researchers, especially from underrepresented groups in our field. Have been a mentor for the Deep Learning Indaba Mentorship Programme since 2021. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you are from an underrepresented group and think I can help you navigate your studies, research or next steps in AI . Happy to help.
Contact Details
email: ykalant(at)image.ntua.gr yannis.kalantidis(at)naverlabs.com
