PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

C. Lawrence Zitnick

Also known as Larry Zitnick, C L Zitnick, C. L. Zitnick, C. Lawrencezitnick, C.L. Zitnick, L. Zitnick

C. Lawrence Zitnick is a computer vision researcher who co-authored the Microsoft COCO and VQA papers. He earned a robotics PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2003, where his research included stereo vision. The COCO team won the IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Prize in 2023, and the COCO paper received the Koenderink Prize in 2024. In 2025 he was the FAIR chemistry research director at Meta and co-authored UMA, a family of universal models for atoms, and he is now a research scientist.

Timeline

  1. 2000–2003

    Stereo vision at Carnegie Mellon

    In 2000 he and Takeo Kanade publish a cooperative algorithm for stereo matching, and he receives a robotics PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003.

  2. 2014–2015

    COCO and VQA papers

    In 2014 he co-authors Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context, and in 2015 he co-authors VQA, which is published at ICCV.

  3. 2015

    PhotoDNA at Microsoft Research

    In 2015 he is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and the developer of PhotoDNA, a technology that Microsoft, Facebook, Google and law enforcement agencies use to combat illegal imagery on the web.

  4. 2018–2020

    fastMRI and OC20 datasets

    In 2018 he co-authors fastMRI, an open dataset and benchmarks for accelerated MRI, and in 2020 he co-authors The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges.

  5. 2023

    Mark Everingham Prize for COCO

    In 2023 the IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Prize goes to the team that develops and maintains COCO, which includes him.

  6. 2024

    Koenderink Prize for COCO

    In 2024 the Koenderink Prize, awarded at ECCV for papers that have withstood the test of time, goes to Microsoft COCO.

  7. 2025

    UMA and FAIR chemistry

    In 2025 he is the FAIR chemistry research director at Meta, and he co-authors UMA, a family of universal models for atoms.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research scientist after FAIR

    He is a research scientist, after earlier roles at Microsoft Research and Meta's FAIR team.

Sources and credits

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  1. C. Lawrence Zitnick cs.cmu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Commonsense, Vision and Language - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University ri.cmu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. [1405.0312] Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. ICCV 2015 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. [1811.08839] fastMRI: An Open Dataset and Benchmarks for Accelerated MRI arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [2010.09990] The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. PAMI Mark Everingham Prize - IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence tc.computer.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. Computer Vision Awards – The Computer Vision Foundation thecvf.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Computational Chemistry Unlocked: A Record-Breaking Dataset to Train AI Models has Launched - Berkeley Lab – Berkeley Lab News Center newscenter.lbl.gov. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. [2506.23971] UMA: A Family of Universal Models for Atoms arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  11. Larry Zitnick larryzitnick.org. Checked 14 October 2026.