Aude Oliva

After a French baccalaureate in Physics and Mathematics, and a B.Sc. in Psychology (minor in Philosophy), Aude Oliva received two M.Sc. degrees—in Experimental Psychology and in Cognitive Science, and a Ph.D from the Institut National Polytechnique of Grenoble, France. She joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2004, the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in 2012, the leadership of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in 2017 and the MIT College of Computing in 2021. From 2015–2017, she was appointed as an Expert at the National Science Foundation, Directorate of Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) in the areas of Computational Neuroscience, Human and Artificial intelligence. As of October 2021, she is the Director of Strategic Industry Engagement in the leadership of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. In this role, she develops and implements strategic relationships between corporate collaborators interested in large-scale, multi-faceted engagements with MIT College of Computing. She serves on the committee on Research Computing and Data, in the VPR MIT Office of Research Computing and Data. See her LinkedIn page.

Her research is cross-disciplinary, spanning cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and computer science, focusing on topics at the intersection of the three domains. Her work in Computational Perception and Cognition builds on the synergy between human and machine recognition, and how it applies to solving high-level recognition problems like understanding scenes and events, perceiving space, modelling attention, memory, and reasoning. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in computational neuroscience, a Guggenheim fellowship in computer science, the 2016 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship in cognitive neuroscience, the 2024 Justine and Yves Sergent Award in cognitive neuroscience, and the 2024 Donald O. Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society. She was an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and an Osher Fellow of the Exploratorium, San Francisco. She is currently on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the MIT Press Management Board. See her Google Scholar profile.