Antonio Torralba is the Delta electronics Professor and head of the AI+D faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 2017 to 2020, he was the MIT director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and, from 2018 to 2020, the inaugural director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, a MIT campus-wide initiative to discover the foundations of intelligence.
He is also member of CSAIL and the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. He received the degree in telecommunications engineering from Telecom BCN, Spain, in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree in signal, image, and speech processing from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, in 2000.
From 2000 to 2005, he spent postdoctoral training at the Brain and Cognitive Science Department and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, where he is now a professor. Prof. Torralba has served as program chair for the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in 2015.
He received the 2008 National Science Foundation (NSF) Career award, the best student paper award at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2009, the 2010 J. K. Aggarwal Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the 2017 Frank Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, the Louis D. Smullin ('39) Award for Teaching Excellence, the 2020 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize, and was named 2021 AAAI fellow.
In 2021, he was awarded the Inaugural Thomas Huang Memorial Prize by the PAMITC. In 2022, he was invested Honoris Causa doctor by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC).
