Rate My Professor Jana Kosecka

Jana Kosecka is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, where she has taught since 1999. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996, working at the GRASP Laboratory under Ruzena Bajcsy, and her M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. Following her doctorate, she held a three-year postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley EECS Department, focusing on perception for autonomous driving, collaborating with Jitendra Malik, S. Shankar Sastry, and others. She has also served as a visiting researcher at Stanford University, Google, and Nokia Research.

Kosecka's research interests encompass computer vision, robotics, and artificial intelligence, particularly the acquisition of static, dynamic, and semantic models of environments via visual sensing, object recognition, scene parsing, visual perception, navigation, machine learning, and human-robot interaction. She is the co-author of over 90 publications in refereed venues, including the monograph 'An Invitation to 3-D Vision: From Images to Geometric Models' (Springer, 2004) with Yi Ma, Stefano Soatto, and S. Shankar Sastry. Select papers include 'Video Compass' (European Conference on Computer Vision, 2002) and 'Vision Guided Navigation for a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot' (The International Journal of Robotics Research, 1999). Her contributions have advanced embodied AI and semantic scene understanding. Kosecka was elected IEEE Fellow in 2023 for contributions to robust embodied vision systems and semantic modeling in robotics, co-received the Marr Prize in 1999, earned an NSF CAREER Award, and received a 2022 Amazon Research Award for hand-shape modeling in American Sign Language recognition. She chairs the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Perception and has given keynotes, including at ICRA 2018.