Antonio Torralba, three MIT alumni, named ACM Fellows

Antonio Torralba, Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Faculty Head of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-making, has been named to the 2025 cohort of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellows. 

A principal investigator within CSAIL, Torralba received his BS in telecommunications engineering from Telecom BCN, Spain, in 1994 and the PhD degree in signal, image, and speech processing from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, in 2000. At different points in his MIT career, he has been director of both the MIT Quest for Intelligence and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Torralba’s research focuses on computer vision, machine learning and human visual perception; as he puts it, “I am interested in building systems that can perceive the world like humans do.” Alongside Phillip Isola and William Freeman, he recently co-authored Foundations of Computer Vision, an 800+ page textbook exploring the foundations and core principles of the field. 

Among other awards and recognitions, he is the recipient of the 2008 National Science Foundation Career award; the 2010 J. K. Aggarwal Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR); the 2017 Frank Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship; the Louis D. Smullin (’39) Award for Teaching Excellence; and the 2020 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the Inaugural Thomas Huang Memorial Prize by the PAMITC and was named a fellow of AAAI. In 2022, he received an honorary doctoral degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC). 

He shares the honor of ACM Fellowship with several other members of the MIT community this year, including the following alumni: 

• Eytan Adar ’97, MEng ’98 

• George Candea ’97, MEng ’98 

• Gookwon Edward Suh SM ’01, PhD ’05 

ACM Fellows, the highest honor bestowed by the professional organization, are registered members of the society selected by their peers for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.