Irfan Essa

About

Irfan Essa is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and a Senior Associate Dean in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He serves as the Inaugural Executive Director of the new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) and is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Inc. His research areas include Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Computer Graphics, and Computational Journalism. He works on topics with potential impact on Autonomous Systems, Video Analysis and Production, Human Computer Interaction, and Computational Behavioral/Social Sciences. He has published over 200 scholarly articles in leading journals and conferences, with several papers winning best paper awards. He has been awarded the NSF CAREER and was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow. His previous roles include extended research consulting with Disney Research and Google Research, and an adjunct faculty position at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. He joined Georgia Tech faculty in 1996 after earning his MS in 1990 and Ph.D. in 1994, and prior research faculty experience at MIT Media Lab from 1988 to 1996.

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Public relations
• Knowledge management
• Engineering
• Data science

Selected publications

• Masked reconstruction based self-supervision for human activity recognition

  2020-09-04 · 133 citations

  article

  The ubiquitous availability of wearable sensing devices has rendered large scale collection of movement data a straightforward endeavor. Yet, annotation of these data remains a challenge and as such, publicly available datasets for human activity recognition (HAR) are typically limited in size as well as in variability, which constrains HAR model training and effectiveness. We introduce masked reconstruction as a viable self-supervised pre-training objective for human activity recognition and ex…

  PublisherDOI

• Neural Design Network: Graphic Layout Generation with Constraints

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2020-01-01 · 119 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Models

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2024-11-01 · 55 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Tackling Hate Speech in Low-resource Languages with Context Experts

  2022 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Given Myanmar’s historical and socio-political context, hate speech spread on social media have escalated into offline unrest and violence. This paper presents findings from our remote study on the automatic detection of hate speech online in Myanmar. We argue that effectively addressing this problem will require community-based approaches that combine the knowledge of context experts with machine learning tools that can analyze the vast amount of data produced. To this end, we develop a systema…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset

  2025-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Charles Nimo, Tobi Olatunji, Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Emmanuel Ayodele, Mardhiyah Sanni, Ezinwanne C. Aka, Folafunmi Omofoye, Foutse Yuehgoh, Timothy Faniran, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Moshood O. Yekini, Jonas Kemp, Katherine A Heller, Jude Chidubem Omeke, Chidi Asuzu Md, Naome A Etori, Aïmérou Ndiaye, Ifeoma Okoh, Evans Doe Ocansey, Wendy Kinara, Michael L. Best, Irfan Essa, Stephen Edward Moore, Chris Fourie, Mercy Nyamewaa Asiedu. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NRI: Representing and Anticipating Actions in Human-Robot Collaborative Assembly Tasks

  NSF · $850k · 2014–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Dhruv Batra

  32 shared

• Vinay Bettadapura

  Atlanta Technical College

  27 shared

• Aneeq Zia

  20 shared

• Gregory D. Abowd

  Northeastern University

  20 shared

• Steven Hickson

  Google (United States)

  18 shared

• Stefan Lee

  Oregon State University

  17 shared

• Devi Parikh

  16 shared

• Vivek Kwatra

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  16 shared

Education

• PhD, MIT Media Lab

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1995

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER

Similar researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology

• Frank Dellaerth-65
• Mark Borodovskyh-64
• Mostafa Ammarh-61