STEFANOS ZAFEIRIOU, PhD

Summary

Stefanos Zafeiriou is a Professor in Machine Learning and Computer Vision with the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and a holder of the prestigious UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Research Fellowship. Previously, he was an EPSRC Early Career Research Fellow (2019-2024) and held a Junior Research Fellowship from Imperial College London (2011). He also served as a Distinguishing Research Fellow with the University of Oulu, Finland, under the Finnish Distinguished Professor Programme (2016-2020).

He has co-authored over 250 papers in top-tier machine learning and computer vision venues, including IEEE T-PAMI and IJCV, as well as at leading conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, and ICML. His research focuses on machine learning models applied to computer vision and biosignal analysis. His work has garnered more than 43,000 citations, resulting in an h-index of 86. In recognition of his work, he has received Imperial College’s President’s Medal for Excellence in Research Supervision (2016) and the President’s Medal for Excellence in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2022). His students are frequent recipients of highly competitive fellowships, such as the Google Fellowship (x2), the Intel Fellowship, and the Qualcomm Fellowship (x4).

He has served as an (Guest) Associate Editor for premier journals such as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He has guest-edited more than eight journal special issues and co-organized over 25 workshops and challenges at top conferences. He also served as the General Chair for BMVC 2017.

In addition to his academic work, he is a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded six startups, such as Facesoft, Ariel AI, and Cogitat, three of which have been successfully exited. He has also served in senior industry roles, including Chief Scientist and Lead at major companies such as Google, where he led large-scale digital human and Generative AI projects.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

• Ploumpis, S., Ververas, E., O’Sullivan, E., Moschoglou, S., Wang, H., Pears, N., Smith, W., Gecer, B. and Zafeiriou, S.P., 2020. Towards a complete 3D morphable model of the human head. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

• Chrysos, G. G., Kossaifi, J., & Zafeiriou, S. (2020). RoCGAN: Robust Conditional GAN. International Journal of Computer Vision, 1-19.

• Ververas, E., & Zafeiriou, S. (2020). SliderGAN: Synthesizing Expressive Face Images by Sliding 3D Blendshape Parameters. International Journal of Computer Vision

• Booth, J., Roussos, A., Ververas, E., Antonakos, E., Ploumpis, S., Panagakis, Y. and Zafeiriou, S., 2018. 3D reconstruction of “in-the-wild” faces in images and videos. IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 40(11), pp.2638-2652.

• Booth, J., Roussos, A., Ponniah, A., Dunaway, D., & Zafeiriou, S. (2018). Large scale 3D morphable models. International Journal of Computer Vision, 126(2-4), 233-254.

Conference

• Gecer, B., Ploumpis, S., Kotsia, I., & Zafeiriou, S. (2019). Ganfit: Generative adversarial network fitting for high fidelity 3d face reconstruction. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1155-1164).

• Deng, J., Guo, J., Ververas, E., Kotsia, I., & Zafeiriou, S. (2020). RetinaFace: Single-Shot Multi-Level Face Localisation in the Wild. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 5203-5212).

• Alp Guler, R., Trigeorgis, G., Antonakos, E., Snape, P., Zafeiriou, S., & Kokkinos, I. (2017). Densereg: Fully convolutional dense shape regression in-the-wild. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 6799-6808).