Rate My Professor Olga Veksler

Professor Olga Veksler is a full professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science within the Computer Science faculty at the University of Waterloo. She earned her B.S. degree summa cum laude with honors in mathematics and computer science from New York University in 1995, followed by M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University in 1999. After completing her doctorate, Veksler worked as a postdoctoral research associate and scientist at NEC Research Institute from 1999 to 2003. She then joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario as an assistant professor in 2003, was promoted to associate professor in 2009, and became a full professor in 2015. In 2018, she moved to her current role at the University of Waterloo.

Veksler's research focuses on computer vision, particularly energy minimization methods, graph algorithms, stereo correspondence, motion estimation, and image segmentation. She is renowned for her contributions to graph cut optimization techniques, highlighted by her co-authored paper 'Fast Approximate Energy Minimization via Graph Cuts,' published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence in 2001, which earned the Helmholtz Test-of-Time Award at ICCV 2011 and has garnered over 10,000 citations. Other significant publications include 'Stereo Correspondence with Compact Windows via Minimum Ratio Cycle' (IEEE TPAMI, 2002), 'Minimizing Energies with Hierarchical Costs' (International Journal of Computer Vision, 2012), 'Local Submodularization for Binary Pairwise Energies' (IEEE TPAMI, 2017), and numerous conference papers at CVPR, ECCV, and ICCV. Her achievements are recognized with awards such as the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (2012–2015), Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (2009), and selection among TPAMI's top 10 most significant publications over 30 years. Veksler has served as an associate editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision and Computer Vision and Image Understanding, acted as an area chair for CVPR and ICCV, and co-organized workshops including the IEEE Workshop on Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision (2008).