Marc Pollefeys wins Dandelion Award 2023
For his outstanding efforts to promote entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich and beyond, Professor Marc Pollefeys has received a Dandelion Award. Congratulations!
Professors play an essential role in Switzerland's start-up and innovation ecosystem by sparking ideas, sharing their knowledge and mentoring the next generation. Each year, ETH students and researchers get the opportunity to nominate professors who demonstrate exceptional commitment and leadership in fostering entrepreneurship. Based on the nominations, a jury picks the winners. One professor from each department is honoured, along with a special award for championing interdisciplinary collaboration and entrepreneurship.
The Dandelion Awards are presented by the ETH AI Center, ETH Entrepreneurship group, ETH Entrepreneur Club and Talent Kick.
Marc Pollefeys is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Director of the Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab, where he works with a team of scientists and engineers to develop advanced perception capabilities for HoloLens and Mixed Reality. He is best known for his contributions to the field of 3D computer vision by pioneering a software pipeline that automates the conversion of photographs into 3D models. He also actively engages in research on robotics, graphics, and machine learning, tackling various challenging problems in these domains. Some of his noteworthy projects are real-time 3D scanning using mobile devices, developing a live pipeline for reconstructing 3D models of cities from vehicle-mounted cameras, designing camera-based autonomous vehicles, and creating the first fully independent drone relying solely on vision-based navigation. His most recent academic research has focused on combining 3D reconstruction with semantic scene understanding.
Marc Pollefeys has received several prizes for his research, including a Google Focus Award (2020), a Sony Faculty Innovation Award (2020) and an SNSF Advanced Grant (2023). He was elected Fellow of the IEEE and ACM Fellow and is a member of the Academia Europaea.