Dr. Cordelia Schmid is a world-renowned computer scientist whose pioneering work has fundamentally transformed the field of computer vision. She currently holds a dual appointment as Research Director at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, and Principal Scientist at Google Research, where she has worked part-time since 2018. She earned her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and her Doctorate from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, where her thesis on "Local Greyvalue Invariants for Image Matching and Retrieval" received the institution's best thesis award in 1996. Following a post-doctoral position at Oxford University, she joined INRIA in 1997, establishing herself as a leading figure in visual recognition through her innovative research on local image descriptors and visual models.
Dr. Schmid's groundbreaking contributions to computer vision include the development of local and semi-local image descriptors that revolutionized the field, moving from simple descriptor matching to leveraging descriptor statistics for more robust categorization. Her early work demonstrated that local grey value invariants could be used alongside geometric constraints to recognize complex objects even in cluttered scenes, laying the foundation for modern approaches to object recognition and image retrieval. She pioneered the transition from staged video analysis to real-world video understanding, releasing the influential Hollywood dataset that enabled significant advances in action classification and video understanding. With over 166,000 citations, her research has had profound impact across academia and industry, earning her the Longuet-Higgins Prize three times (2006, 2014, 2016) for fundamental contributions that have withstood the test of time. Her work has become foundational to modern image detection systems used in applications ranging from digital photography to industrial robotics.
Beyond her research achievements, Dr. Schmid has shaped the computer vision community through extensive service, having served as Associate Editor for IEEE PAMI and IJCV, Editor-in-Chief of IJCV, and chair of major conferences including CVPR, ECCV, and ICCV. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, and a fellow of IEEE and the ELLIS society, recognizing her exceptional contributions to the field. Her recent accolades include the Körber European Science Prize (2023), the European Inventor Award (2024), and the ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2025), which cited her "outstanding contributions to computer vision in image retrieval, object recognition and video understanding." As she continues her dual appointment at INRIA and Google, Dr. Schmid remains at the forefront of computer vision research, guiding the next generation of scientists while advancing the frontiers of visual understanding in artificial intelligence.
