Rate My Professor Gianfranco Doretto

Gianfranco Doretto is a Professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering within the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources at West Virginia University. He serves as the director of the Vision and Learning Group at WVU. Doretto earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005 and 2002, respectively, along with a D.Eng. degree summa cum laude in Electronics Engineering from the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy, in 1998. After completing his Ph.D., he held the position of Lead Scientist at GE Global Research. In August 2010, he joined West Virginia University as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in August 2016, and advanced to Professor in August 2023. He is also the co-founder and CTO of a WVU spin-off company focused on vision and learning technologies.

Doretto's academic interests center on artificial intelligence, with a focus on computer vision, machine learning, and biomedical data science. His influential publications include "Dynamic Textures," published in the International Journal of Computer Vision in 2003; "Shape and Appearance Context Modeling," presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in 2007; and "Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation," released in 2017. His research has amassed over 8,887 citations and an h-index of 32 on Google Scholar, demonstrating substantial impact in the field. Doretto has led significant funded projects, such as a $2 million NSF grant in 2022 for unsupervised continual machine learning drawing from the neuroscience of electric fish, a $3.6 million NIH BRAIN Initiative SBIR grant for AI in virtual reality applications, and a $3 million NSF NRT grant. In 2023, the Statler College honored him as Outstanding Researcher of the Year at the senior level. Furthermore, he organized the 2024 Bioinspired Machine Learning workshop and engages in committee roles and editorial contributions through his laboratory and department affiliations.