Irfan Essa is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing (iC) and a Senior Associate Dean in the College of Computing (CoC), at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech), in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He is serving as the Inaugural Executive Director of the new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT). He also serves as a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Inc. Professor Essa works in the areas of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Computer Graphics, Computational Perception, Robotics, Computer Animation, and Social Computing, with potential impact on Autonomous Systems, Video Analysis, and Production (e.g., Computational Photography & Video, Image-based Modeling and Rendering, etc.) Human Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Behavioral/Social Sciences, and Computational Journalism research.  He has published over 200 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on these topics and several of his papers have also won best paper awards. He has been awarded the NSF CAREER  and was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow. He has held extended research consulting positions with Disney Research and Google Research and also was an Adjunct Faculty Member at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.  He joined GA Tech Faculty in 1996 after his earning his MS (1990), Ph.D. (1994), and holding research faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Media Lab) [1988-1996].