About Me

A condensed version of my academic/industry experiences, publications and achievements can be found in my Curriculum Vitae. Contact information is available on my homepage.


Brief Bio

Tomasz

Tomasz Malisiewicz received his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. He is now a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT CSAIL, working with Antonio Torralba. He is broadly interested in computer vision, human vision, and machine learning. During his PhD, he was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, spent two summers as an intern in Google Research, as well as one semester as a visiting student at École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

My research is in the field of Computer Vision, and I am interested in image understanding, object recognition, segmentation, and the machine learning techniques required to tackle such problems. I build intelligent machines that can "see" and my research draws upon ideas from computer vision, machine learning, psychology, philosophy, and physics.

Wordle from
      PhD thesis

Biography

MIT

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MIT CSAIL, working with Antonio Torralba.

From 2005 until 2011 I was a PhD student at CMU's Robotics Institute, where I worked under the supervision of Alexei (Alyosha) Efros. During my last 2 years at CMU, I also routinely collaborated with Abhinav Gupta. From 2006 to 2009 my research was funded by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (check out my bio on the NSF website). At CMU, I was the Teaching Assistant for Martial Hebert's Computer Vision course in 2006 and Alexei A. Efros's Learning-Based Methods in Vision course in 2009.

CMU
RPI

From 2001 until 2005, I was as undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I graduated in May 2005 with Dual Computer Science and Physics Majors and a Minor in Mathematics. At RPI I worked with Charles Stewart on biomedical vision applications as well as range data registration. Daniel Freedman introduced me to Computer Vision research in 2002 when he taught the Computational Vision course at RPI. At RPI, I was an undergraduate teaching assistant for numerous Computer Science II and Data Structures and Algorithms courses. As a freshman at RPI, I was a tutor for physics, computer science, and calculus courses.

Before joining RPI, I was a student at the Patchogue-Medford High School in Medford, NY. I was the valedictorian of the Class of 2001, a semifinalist of the US Physics team, and took Calculus II at SUNY Stony Brook University.

PMHS
Poland

I came to the United States when I was 8 years old from Włocławek, Poland. I still speak Polish, so if you're passing by me in the hallway don't be afraid to say cześć.


Internships

ENS

From February until May 2008 I was a visiting student researcher at ENS Paris as part of the WILLOW Research Laboratory.

During both summer 2008 and summer 2009 I worked on large-scale Computer Vision problems at Google as a Software Engineering Intern. I spent both summers in Jay Yagnik's Computer Vision group in Mountain View, CA. I was supervised by Thomas Leung during my first internship and Dennis Strelow during my second internship.

Google Research
BNL

During the summer of 2002, I won the Energy Research Undergraduate Laboratory Fellowship (ERULF) and was an intern at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)'s Physics Department. The title of my project was "Modeling Relativistic Muons in Electromagnetic Storage Rings via Object Oriented Techniques" and the abstract of my summer project can be found on the Department of Energy Summer 2002 abstracts website.


Hobbies & Fun Stuff

The most influential book in my life has been Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It made me rethink my scientific interests, and I decided that I wanted to study Computer Vision instead of becoming a theoretical physicist. I still read many great works of philosophy and one of my favorites is William James's 1907 classic "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking."

When not pursuing scholarly endeavors, I enjoy playing guitar (electric as well as classical), snowboarding, mountain biking, running (with my Vibram Five Fingers) and reading fiction. I also enjoy SCUBA Diving, but don't get to dive nearly as much as I'd like to. I obtained my SCUBA certification in Kona, Hawaii in 1998. I've visited many exciting locations in the Caribbean including: Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, USVI, BVI, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Martin, Dominica, as well as Costa Rica.

I often blog about vision/research/hacking/philosophy on my computer vision blog: "tombone's blog". Check it out!