Irfan Essa

Irfan Aziz Essa is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing, and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). He is an associate dean in Georgia Tech's College of Computing and the director of the new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT).
Education.
Essa obtained his undergraduate degree in engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1988. Following this, Essa attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his magister scientiae (Master of Science) in 1990 and his Ph.D. in 1995 at the MIT Media Lab. His doctoral research focused on the implementation of a system to detect emotions from changes in your facial expression, which was later featured in the New York Times. He proceeded to hold a position as a research scientist at MIT from 1994 to 1996 before accepting a position at Georgia Tech.
Professional career.
Essa's work focuses mainly in the areas of computer vision, computational photography, computer graphics and animation, robotics, computational perception, human-computer interaction, machine learning, computational journalism and artificial intelligence.
After departing MIT, Essa accepted a position as an assistant professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Today, he holds the position of a professor, and continues his research endeavors alongside his teaching career.
Essa has taught various courses over the years on digital video special effects, computer vision, computational journalism and computational photography. In the spring of 2013, Essa taught a free online course on computational photography, on the MOOC platform Coursera. He is affiliated with the GVU Center and RIM@GT, and is one of the faculty members of the Computational Perception Laboratory at Georgia Tech.
In addition to this, Essa has organized the Computational Journalism Symposium both in 2008 and 2013. He is credited, alongside his doctoral student Nick Diakopoulos, with coining the term "computational journalism" back in 2006, when they taught the first class on the subject.
Most recently, Essa has worked as a researcher / consultant with Google to develop a video stabilization algorithm alongside two of his doctoral students, Matthias Grundmann and Vivek Kwatra, which now runs on YouTube, and allows users to stabilize their uploaded videos in real-time.