PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Holger Caesar

Holger Caesar is an Assistant Professor at TU Delft who builds the datasets and methods behind autonomous-vehicle perception. After studies in Germany and Switzerland, he earned a computer vision PhD at the University of Edinburgh under Vittorio Ferrari, with a 2018 thesis that includes the COCO-Stuff dataset. He coauthored PointPillars in 2019 and developed the nuScenes dataset and the nuPlan planning benchmark at the autonomous-vehicle company Motional, where he was a Principal Research Scientist. In April 2022 he joined the Intelligent Vehicles group at TU Delft, and he became an ELLIS Scholar in 2024. Since March 2026, he is Co-Director of the ELLIS Delft Unit.

Badges

Timeline

  1. By 2018

    A computer vision PhD

    He studies at KIT Karlsruhe, EPF Lausanne and ETH Zurich, then earns a PhD in computer vision at the University of Edinburgh under Vittorio Ferrari. His 2018 thesis includes COCO-Stuff, which adds pixel-wise annotations for 91 stuff classes to all 164K images of the COCO 2017 dataset.

  2. 2019

    PointPillars for lidar detection

    He coauthors PointPillars with Alex H. Lang, Sourabh Vora and others, an encoder that organizes lidar point clouds in vertical columns for object detection. The method runs at 62 Hz, and the paper is accepted at CVPR 2019.

  3. 2019–2020

    The nuScenes dataset

    He is first author of nuScenes, the first dataset to carry the full autonomous vehicle sensor suite of 6 cameras, 5 radars and 1 lidar. The paper reaches arXiv in March 2019 and CVPR 2020, and Motional publishes it in May 2020. He develops and leads the dataset during his time at Motional, formerly nuTonomy.

  4. 2021

    The nuPlan benchmark

    In June 2021, he is first author of the nuPlan paper, which proposes the first closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous driving. It offers 1500 hours of human driving data from Boston, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Singapore.

  5. April 2022

    Assistant Professor at TU Delft

    In April 2022, he starts as Assistant Professor in the Intelligent Vehicles group at TU Delft, after serving as Principal Research Scientist at Motional, where he started 3 teams with 20+ members for data annotation, autolabeling and data mining. His research covers perception and prediction for autonomous vehicles, with a focus on scalable learning and annotation.

  6. February 2024

    Perception with almost no labels

    In an ELLIS Delft talk in February 2024, he describes nuScenes and PointPillars as the first generation of perception systems and nuPlan as the second. He envisions a third generation that needs little to no human labeling, using active learning, object discovery, self-supervised learning and foundation models.

  7. October 2024

    An ELLIS Scholar

    He becomes an ELLIS Scholar in October 2024 and joins the board of ELLIS Delft. TU Delft names him among four new ELLIS Scholars, with Wendelin Böhmer, Emir Demirović and Xucong Zhang.

  8. Since March 2026

    Co-director of ELLIS Delft

    In March 2026, he becomes Co-Director of the ELLIS Delft Unit, which lists him and Frans A. Oliehoek as Unit Directors. He is an Assistant Professor in the Intelligent Vehicles group at TU Delft.

Career

  1. Since 2024European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent SystemsBoard Member, Co-Director
  2. Since 2022Delft University of TechnologyAssistant Professor
  3. Until 2022MotionalPrincipal Research Scientist

Education

  1. 2018University of EdinburghPhD
  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  3. EPFL
  4. ETH Zurich

From the biography.

  1. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  2. 44% of AI career moves go from one university to anotherIncludes European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. We estimate how 26,439 AI career moves link universities, companies, labs, nonprofits and government research centers, with decade counts, net flows and the top paths.
  3. 5 of the 25 people with the most-cited recent papers also lead on career citationsIncludes European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. We compare citations to 2023–2025 papers with career citations and h-index, after correcting reviewed publication-date errors: who leads, when they started and where they work.
  4. LinkedIn (1,377) and X (1,193) lead social platforms across 1,935 people shaping AIIncludes European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. We find social, code or video accounts for 1,935 of the 7,547 people shaping AI (26%), led by LinkedIn (1,377), X (1,193) and GitHub (557).

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 Holger Caesar yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Dr. H. (Holger) Caesar tudelft.nl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Restoring the balance between stuff and things in scene understanding era.ed.ac.uk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving - Motional motional.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Holger Caesar's Homepage - Media sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Holger Caesar's Homepage sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. ELLIS Delft Talk by Holger Ceasar: Building machine perception systems with (almost) no labels tudelft.nl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. 9 researchers from ELLIS Unit Delft honoured with Fellows or Scholars title tudelft.nl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. ELLIS Unit Delft ellis.eu. Checked 21 October 2026.