PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Genevieve Patterson

Also known as Geneviève Patterson, G. Patterson

Genevieve Patterson is a computer vision researcher who uses human input to build visual datasets and AI systems. She studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Arizona and electrical machines at Tokyo, then earned a computer science PhD at Brown in 2016. Her Brown and Microsoft work included crowd-powered visual classifiers and the COCO Attributes dataset, and in 2018 she co-founded Trash, an AI video editor VSCO acquired in 2020. She worked on AI for climate and sustainability in 2022, shared the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize with the COCO team in 2023, and co-authored the FathomVerse deep-sea dataset in 2024. She is an independent computer vision and HCI researcher and founder of Barderry Applied Research LLC, and she presented on agentic AI for ecology in June 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2009–2014

    Electrical machines and SUN attributes

    She studies electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Arizona and electrical machines at the University of Tokyo. Her transverse-flux motor work wins an Outstanding Paper award at ICEMS 2009. At Brown's Hays Lab, she builds the SUN Attribute Database with 102 scene attributes across more than 700 categories and 14,340 images; she coauthors papers in 2012 and 2014.

  2. 2013–2017

    Crowd-powered computer vision

    At Brown's Hays Lab, she develops crowd-in-the-loop classifiers in 2013 and coauthors the 2015 Tropel system, which builds detectors from one example and crowd input. The COCO Attributes dataset carries 3.5 million object-attribute pairs for 180,000 objects, and she completes a computer science PhD under James Hays at Brown in 2016. After her doctorate, she joins Microsoft Research New England as a postdoctoral researcher and serves as a poster chair for its New England Machine Learning Day in 2017.

  3. 2018–2020

    Trash's AI video editor

    She co-founds Trash with Hannah Donovan in 2018. Its AI analyzes user video clips, picks the shots with the highest visual interest, and assembles edited videos; VSCO acquires the app in 2020, and Patterson becomes Head of Product Research.

  4. 2022

    AI for climate and sustainability

    She leads VSCO's applied research on computer vision and blockchain until July 2022 and serves as a Core Team Volunteer at Climate Change AI. In 2022, she co-edits an IEEE Latin America Transactions special issue on artificial intelligence for sustainability.

  5. 2023

    PAMI Mark Everingham Prize

    She receives the 2023 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize with the COCO team for her contribution to the COCO Challenge.

  6. 2024

    FathomVerse deep-sea dataset

    She coauthors the 2024 FathomVerse paper, which introduces a community science game to label ocean imagery. Its v0 dataset contains 3,843 images, 8,092 bounding boxes, and 12 morphological groups recorded on the deep seafloor.

  7. As of October 2026

    Research at Barderry

    She is an independent researcher in computer vision and HCI and founder of Barderry Applied Research LLC. She serves on the FathomNet team as a computer vision and HCI researcher at Barderry Consulting. In June 2026, she presents agentic AI workflows for climate science and ecology at Concordia, with examples from macaque behavior tracking and green crab molting detection.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Genevieve Patterson yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Datacast Episode 17: Computer Vision Research with Genevieve Patterson james-le-esz9.squarespace.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. SUN Attribute Database: Discovering, Annotating, and Recognizing Scene Attributes cs.brown.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Geneviève Patterson - Computer Vision and HCI genp.github.io. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Alum Entrepreneurs: Geneviève Patterson Brings AI-Powered Video Editing To Millions cs.brown.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. New England Machine Learning Day 2017 microsoft.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Editorial: Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability latamt.ieeer9.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. FathomVerse: A community science dataset for ocean animal discovery arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Meet the Team fathomnet.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. LEADS Wraps Up! concordia.ca. Checked 19 October 2026.