Abhinav Gupta, associate professor in the Robotics Institute, is the winner of the 2020 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, which is presented every two years by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) to a scientist under age 40 who has had a major impact on computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing.

The IAPR is honoring Gupta "for pioneering contributions to unsupervised and self-supervised
learning in computer vision and robotics." The award's namesake, Aggarwal, is an emeritus professor at the University of Texas who has made substantial contributions to pattern recognition and to the IAPR.

Gupta, a CMU faculty member since 2011, is also research manager at Facebook AI Research. His work focuses on scaling up learning by building self-supervised, lifelong and interactive learning systems. Specifically, he is interested in how self-supervised systems can effectively use data to learn visual representation, common sense and representation for actions in robots.

He will receive the Aggarwal prize at the IAPR's premier conference, the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which will be held virtually Jan. 10-15. He will present an award lecture, "Towards Self-supervised Curious Robots," regarding efforts by his lab and others to enable robots to learn on their own as they explore their environments.

Gupta is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Office of Naval Research's Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Bosch Young Faculty Fellowship, the IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Young Researcher Award and the Okawa Foundation Research Grant.