Aude Oliva: Osher Fellow

Dr. Aude Oliva holds a French baccalaureate in physics and mathematics, a BS in psychology, and two MS degrees: one in experimental psychology, and the other in cognitive science. Oliva also has a PhD from the Institute National Polytechnique of Grenoble, France. She joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2004, and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2012.

Her work has been regularly featured in both the scientific and popular press, in museums, and in textbooks about perception, cognition, computer vision, and design. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the recipient of the 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in Computer Science. The National Science Foundation, the National Eye Institute, Google, and Xerox fund her work.

Oliva's interdisciplinary research focuses on questions at the intersections of three domains: human perception/cognition, computer vision, and cognitive neuroscience. Her work in computational perception and cognition builds on the synergy between human and machine perception and cognition, and how it applies to solving high-level recognition problems. These problems can include understanding scenes and events; perceiving spaces; localizing sounds; recognizing objects; modeling attention; eye movements; visual memory; and predicting subjective properties of images (like image memorability). Oliva's research integrates knowledge and tools from image processing, image statistics, computer vision, human perception, and cognition and neuroimaging.