Jean Ponce
Jean Ponce is a computer vision researcher whose work spans multi-view stereopsis and sparse coding. He studied mathematics at ENSET, discovered computer vision through a DEA at Orsay, and completed a thesis with Olivier Faugeras at INRIA before postdoctoral work at MIT. His career included posts at Inria, MIT, Stanford, and Illinois; he later led WILLOW, ENS's computer science department, and an Inria–NYU AI collaboration. His online dictionary-learning work with Julien Mairal, Francis Bach, and Guillermo Sapiro received ICML's 2019 Test of Time Award, and his 2007 multi-view stereopsis article received the 2020 Longuet-Higgins Prize. As of October 2026, he holds professorships at ENS and NYU, directs PRAIRIE's research, leads Enhance Lab, and is an ELLIS Fellow.
- Now at
- École Normale Supérieure, New York University, Paris Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and Enhance Lab
- Works
- 462
- Citations
- 43,951
- h-index
- 78
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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Before 1983
Starting in mathematics
He studied mathematics at ENSET and discovered computer science through a course in Sèvres.
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1983
Discovering computer vision
A DEA at Orsay introduced him to computer vision. He completed a thesis with Olivier Faugeras at INRIA in 1983.
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By 2005
Research across institutions
He completed postdoctoral work at MIT and held posts at Inria, Stanford, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a full professor until 2005.
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2011–2017
Leading ENS computer science
At the time, he led WILLOW, which aimed to give computers human-like visual abilities. He directed ENS's computer science department from 2011 to 2017.
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2017–2022
Coordinating an AI partnership
He served as Inria research director and visiting faculty at NYU, on leave from ENS to lead the Inria/NYU collaboration in AI.
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2019
Learning dictionaries online
With Julien Mairal, Francis Bach, and Guillermo Sapiro, he coauthored an online optimization method for dictionary learning that scales to large datasets. ICML gave the work its 2019 Test of Time Award under the title “Online Dictionary Learning for Sparse Coding.”
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2020
A Longuet-Higgins prize
His 2007 article “Accurate, Dense and Robust Multi-View Stereopsis” received the 2020 Longuet-Higgins Prize from the IEEE PAMI committee.
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As of October 2026
Research and imaging leadership
He is a professor at ENS and a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. ELLIS lists him as a Fellow. He serves as scientific director of PRAIRIE and as co-founder and CEO of Enhance Lab, which commercializes software for super-resolution and high dynamic range imaging.
Sources and credits
Photo: di.ens.fr; Jean Ponce; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: di.ens.fr. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.