Derek Hoiem

Derek Hoiem
Derek Hoiem
Executive Associate Director, Associate Director for AI Strategy and Programs
(217) 333-0806
3312 Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science

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Biography

Derek Hoiem is a Professor in the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which he joined in 2009. He earned his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and completed a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008. Prof. Hoiem is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Reconstruct, providing an AI-based Visual Command Center to provide construction stakeholders with timely access to project information. Hoiem is an IEEE Fellow, and his research in computer vision and related areas has been recognized with an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award honorable mention, CVPR best paper award, NSF CAREER grant, Intel Early Career Faculty award, Sloan Fellowship, IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award, University Scholar, and ECCV Koenderink test of time award.

Academic Positions

  • Professor, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, 2021 to present

Research Interests

  • Computer Vision, Object Recognition, Scene Understanding, Graphics

Research Areas

Honors

  • IEEE Fellow (2022)
  • University Scholar (2022)
  • Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, Asssociate Professor (2021)
  • Campus Distinguished Promotion Award (2015)
  • CW Gear Junior Faculty Award (2014)
  • IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award (2014)
  • Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, Assistant Professor (2014)
  • Sloan Research Fellowship (2013)
  • NSF CAREER Award (2011)

Teaching Honors

  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Fall 2021)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Spring 2021)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Fall 2020)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Spring 2020)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Fall 2017)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Spring 2017)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Spring 2015)
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (Fall 2014)
  • List of Teachers Rated Excellent (Fall 2013)
  • List of Teachers Rated Excellent (Spring 2012)
  • List of Teachers Rated Excellent (Fall 2011)
  • List of Teachers Rated Excellent (Spring 2011)
  • List of Teachers Rated Excellent (Fall 2010)

Research Honors

  • Koendrink Prize (2022)
  • Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, Associate Professor (2021)
  • Best Paper Award: IEEE Winter Conference on Applications in Computer Vision (WACV)(2015)
  • IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award (2014)
  • Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, Assistant Professor (2014)
  • Sloan Research Fellowship (2013)
  • Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program Award (2012)
  • NSF CAREER Award (2011)
  • ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention, 2008. (runner-up for best dissertation in computer science, internationally)
  • Carnegie Mellon University SCS Distinguished Dissertation Award, 2008 (best dissertation in computer science at CMU)
  • Best Paper Award: IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2006)

Recent Courses Taught

  • CS 441 - Applied Machine Learning
  • CS 445 - Computational Photography
  • CS 598 DWH - 3D Vision

News Notes

  • 10/8/2026

    CS professor Derek Hoiem, will be the opening keynote speaker at the Illinois Higher Education Equity Symposium on October 8-9. Hoeim's talk, "The Role of Higher Education in AI's Future," focuses on the potential for AI to transform society and what higher education should do about it. He will present AI as a communication technology, as a knowledge work automation technology and emphasize the need for collective action to shape AI's impact, stressing that higher education institutions should lead with outward-facing coordination and inward-facing transformation. Hoeim's examples will include the AI Coordination Hub, DPI, and the Illinois AI Framework.