Martial Hebert

Martial Hebert is a leading researcher in computer vision and robotics, and has been a CMU faculty member for the last 35 years. A native of France, Hebert earned a doctorate in computer science at the University of Paris. He joined the Robotics InstituteOpens in new window, the world’s largest robotics education and research institution, in 1984, just five years after it was founded.

Upon joining the CMU faculty, Hebert became part of the Autonomous Land Vehicles program, a precursor of today’s research on self-driving vehicles. He performed research on interpreting 3D data from range sensors for obstacle detection, environment modeling and object recognition. For the next three decades, he led major research programs in autonomous systems, including ground and air vehicles, with contributions in the areas of perception for environment understanding and human interaction.

His research interests center on computer vision. He has led research on fundamental components, such as scene understanding, object recognition and applying machine learning to computer vision, as well as applications, which include systems that enable older adults and people with disabilities to live more independently. To meet the needs of a rapidly expanding computer vision industry, he created the nation’s first master’s degree program in computer vision.

Hebert is a member of both the IEEE Robotics and Automation, and the IEEE Computer societies. Throughout his career, he has published hundreds of refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings, and has contributed to multiple edited volumes. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision.

Hebert served as director of the Robotics Institute from 2014 to 2020, when he stepped down to take up a new mantle: Dean of CMU’s School of Computer Science. In 2022, he was appointed to the rank of University Professor, the highest distinction a faculty member can achieve at CMU.