Katerina Fragkiadaki, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the organization's most prestigious award for young faculty members. The five-year, $546,000 award will support her work on computer vision.

Fragkiadaki's research interests include computer vision, robot behavior learning and visual language grounding. Her NSF-supported project will help her develop neural network architectures that take video inputs and not only learn to differentiate between camera motion and the scene, but also capture that scene and translate it into 3D maps. The agents are trained to predict the future rather than labels of objects and actions, greatly reducing the need for human supervision in learning.

The proposed research could impact the control of any vision-enabled mobile agents, such as ground vehicles and drones. It's also instrumental in reducing the cost of programming robots and other technology, such as personal assistants, and in bringing AI systems closer to human-level performance in visual reasoning.

Fragkiadaki earned her bachelor's degree at the National Technical University of Athens, and her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining CMU, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Google Research.