Svetlana Lazebnik

2017 Early Career Academic Achievement Alumni Award

An Associate Professor of Computer Science at Illinois, Svetlana Lazebnik explores research topics in computer vision, including the joint modeling of images and text, modeling and organizing large-scale photograph collections, object recognition, scene understanding, and machine learning techniques for visual recognition.

For this work, Lazebnik has won a number of prestigious awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Early CAREER Award, a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and a DARPA Computer Science Study Group Award.  She has also received several recognitions at Illinois, including the CS @ ILLINOIS C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 2013 and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from College of Engineering that same year.

Last year, Lazebnik was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize  for her 2006 IEEE CVPR paper, “Beyond Bags of Features: Spatial Pyramid Matching for Recognizing Natural Scene Categories,” due to its lasting impact on computer vision research, specifically, on scene categorization.  

Lazebnik has taught courses focused on computer vision and artificial intelligence, including deep learning as it is applied to computer vision and language.  She was recognized as an excellent teacher at the University of North Carolina, where she served as an assistant professor before returning to her alma mater in 2012.