PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Hadar Averbuch-Elor

Hadar Averbuch-Elor is a computer vision and graphics researcher who connects pixels with natural language and 3D geometry. She earned a B.Sc. from the Technion, then a Ph.D. under Daniel Cohen-Or at Tel Aviv University, coauthored "Bringing Portraits to Life" at SIGGRAPH Asia in 2017, and received a Schmidt Sciences postdoctoral award in 2017 for work at Cornell Tech with Noah Snavely. After taking part in Berkeley's Rising Stars workshop in 2020 and coauthoring the Who's Waldo dataset in 2021, she served as an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University and joined the Cornell Tech faculty in fall 2024. In 2025 she coauthored WildCAT3D, which generates new views of a scene from a single photo, and in July 2026 the SIGGRAPH paper "Composing People Together" on multi-person image generation appeared with her as coauthor. She is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Timeline

  1. 2017

    Bringing portraits to life

    After a B.Sc. in electrical engineering at the Technion, she pursues a Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University under Daniel Cohen-Or. In 2017, she coauthors "Bringing Portraits to Life" at SIGGRAPH Asia with Cohen-Or, Johannes Kopf and Michael F. Cohen, a technique that animates a single still portrait using a driving video of a different person.

  2. 2017

    A Schmidt postdoctoral award

    In 2017, Schmidt Sciences lists her as a recipient of its Israeli Women's Postdoctoral Award, with Cornell Tech as her institution and electrical engineering as her field. Her postdoctoral research at Cornell Tech is with Noah Snavely.

  3. 2020

    Rising Stars and a best paper

    In 2020, she takes part in the Rising Stars in EECS workshop at UC Berkeley. Her coauthored paper "READ: Recursive Autoencoders for Document Layout Generation" wins a best paper award at a CVPR 2020 workshop.

  4. 2021

    The Who's Waldo dataset

    In 2021, she coauthors "Who's Waldo? Linking People Across Text and Images" with Claire Yuqing Cui, Apoorv Khandelwal, Yoav Artzi and Noah Snavely, an ICCV 2021 oral paper. It defines person-centric visual grounding, which links people named in a caption to people pictured in an image, and introduces a dataset mined from image-caption data on Wikimedia Commons.

  5. 2024

    Back to Cornell Tech

    After a two-year post as an assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University, she joins the Department of Computer Science at Cornell Tech as an assistant professor in fall 2024. She returns to the campus where she was a postdoctoral research scholar under Noah Snavely in the Cornell Graphics and Vision Group, and she has also held industry research positions at Amazon and Facebook.

  6. 2025

    WildCAT3D novel views

    In 2025, she coauthors WildCAT3D with Morris Alper, David Novotny, Filippos Kokkinos and Tom Monnier, a framework that generates novel views of scenes learned from 2D scene images captured in the wild, such as tourist photos. The work is presented at NeurIPS in December 2025 and produces scene-level views from a single image of a new scene.

  7. July 2026

    Composing People Together

    In July 2026, doctoral student Wenxuan Peng presents "Composing People Together: Iterative Pose-Image Generation for Multi-Person Interaction Scenes" at SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles, with Averbuch-Elor and Bharath Hariharan as coauthors. The model builds a scene one person at a time, predicting each person's pose before generating the image, and trains on the Who's Waldo dataset.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Cornell Tech

    She is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and a member of the Cornell Graphics and Vision Group. Her research combines pixels with natural language and 3D geometry to build perception systems that reconstruct, generate and understand the real 3D world.

Career

  1. Since 2017Cornell UniversityPostdoctoral Research Scholar, Assistant Professor
  2. Until 2024Tel Aviv UniversityAssistant Professor

Education

  1. TechnionB.Sc.
  2. Tel Aviv UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Hadar Averbuch-Elor. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Cornell University. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  3. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Cornell University. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Cornell University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

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 Hadar Averbuch-Elor yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Hadar Averbuch-Elor cs.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. “Bringing portraits to life” by Averbuch-Elor, Cohen-Or, Kopf and Cohen – ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES history.siggraph.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Hadar Averbuch-Elor | Department of Computer Science | Cornell Bowers cs.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Hadar Elor-Averbuch - Schmidt Sciences schmidtsciences.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Rising Stars 2020: Participants - EECS at Berkeley eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [2108.07253] Who's Waldo? Linking People Across Text and Images arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Cornell Tech - Hadar Averbuch-Elor, David Reiss, and Angelina Wang Join the Cornell Tech Faculty tech.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Meet the new faculty: Hadar Averbuch-Elor | Cornell Bowers bowers.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. [2506.13030] WildCAT3D: Appearance-Aware Multi-View Diffusion in the Wild arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. WildCAT3 Makes it Easier to Visualize 3D Scenes From Photos tech.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Strike a pose: Creating more realistic multi-person images | Cornell Chronicle news.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.