PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Lorenzo Torresani

Lorenzo Torresani is a computer vision researcher whose video models aim at AI assistants that see through wearable cameras. After a Stanford PhD in 2005, he joined the Dartmouth computer science faculty in 2009 and held positions at Meta from 2018 to 2024, most recently as a Research Director. He coauthored C3D, a 3D convolutional network for video features, in 2015 and TimeSformer, a convolution-free video classifier, in 2021, and he was among the authors of the Ego4D egocentric video dataset. His honors include a National Science Foundation early-career award in 2010 and a Fulbright award for 2017–2018. He joined Northeastern University in 2025 and is a professor and Aoun Chair at its Khoury College of Computer Sciences, where he leads the FarSight Lab.

Now at
Northeastern University and Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2005–2008

    PhD and non-rigid 3D shape

    He earns a PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 2005. In 2008, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence publishes his paper "Non-Rigid Structure-From-Motion: Estimating Shape and Motion with Hierarchical Priors." He is the author of the first methods for 3D reconstruction of non-rigid objects.

  2. 2009–2014

    Professor at Dartmouth

    After working at Riya, a visual search engine, and at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, he joins the Dartmouth computer science faculty in 2009. A National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award in 2010 supports his work on image search, and Dartmouth grants him tenure in 2014.

  3. 2015

    The C3D features

    In 2015, he coauthors "Learning Spatiotemporal Features with 3D Convolutional Networks" for the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, with Du Tran, Lubomir Bourdev, Rob Fergus and Manohar Paluri. The paper presents C3D, features learned by deep 3D convolutional networks that, with a simple linear classifier, outperform state-of-the-art methods on 4 benchmarks.

  4. 2017–2018

    Fulbright Scholar in Ghana

    He is named a Fulbright Scholar for the 2017–2018 academic year. From January 2018 to June 2018, he lectures and does research in Ghana, teaching machine learning and applying it to challenges in the local economy.

  5. 2018–2024

    Research Director at Meta

    From 2018 to 2024, he holds positions at Meta, formerly Facebook, most recently as a Research Director for multimodal research teams at Fundamental AI Research (FAIR). Dartmouth promotes him to full professor in 2020, and his time on its faculty ends in 2021.

  6. 2021

    TimeSformer and Ego4D

    In 2021, he coauthors TimeSformer with Gedas Bertasius and Heng Wang, a convolution-free video classifier built on self-attention over space and time that reaches the best reported accuracy on Kinetics-400 and Kinetics-600. He is also among the authors of Ego4D, an egocentric video dataset of 3,670 hours of daily-life activity captured by 931 camera wearers.

  7. 2025

    Aoun Chair at Northeastern

    At the 2025 Egocentric Vision workshop at CVPR, his video-audio work takes first place in the Ego4D EgoSchema Challenge and earns three Distinguished Paper Awards. In 2025, he joins Northeastern's Khoury College of Computer Sciences as the President Joseph E. Aoun Chair, after serving as a Meta research director.

  8. As of October 2026

    FarSight Lab and SAGE

    He is a professor and President Joseph E. Aoun Chair at Khoury College, where he leads the FarSight Lab on egocentric video understanding for wearable assistants and strategic reasoning over team sports. In 2026, his tests of popular AI models on sports footage show that they cannot explain why things happen or predict what comes next. With Kristen Grauman and Amy Pavel, he receives a three-year National Science Foundation award for SAGE, a proposed AI coach for skill learning.

Career

  1. Since 2025Northeastern UniversityProfessor and President Joseph E. Aoun Chair
  2. NowKhoury College of Computer SciencesLab Lead
  3. 2018–2024FAIR (Meta)Research Director
  4. 2009–2021Dartmouth CollegeProfessor

Education

  1. 2005Stanford UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Lorenzo Torresani. 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.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Northeastern 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.
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Northeastern University. 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.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Northeastern University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

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 Lorenzo Torresani yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. CS Distinguished Lecture: "Towards perceptual AI assistants" with Lorenzo Torresani bu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Lorenzo Torresani | Faculty Directory faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Professor receives award from NSF - The Dartmouth thedartmouth.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [Colloquium] REMINDER: [TTIC Talks] 3/6 Talks at TTIC: Lorenzo Torresani, META mailman.cs.uchicago.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Learning Spatiotemporal Features with 3D Convolutional Networks arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Cancer Surgeon and Computer Scientist Win Fulbrights students.dartmouth.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Lorenzo Torresani | Fulbright Scholar Program fulbrightscholars.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding? arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. As his awards list grows, Lorenzo Torresani crafts AI assistants for help with everyday tasks khoury.northeastern.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Lorenzo Torresani Named Joseph E. Aoun Professor news.northeastern.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Lorenzo Torresani - Khoury College of Computer Sciences khoury.northeastern.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  13. This researcher put AI in the big game. It did not play well news.northeastern.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  14. Can’t get a private coach? This AI tool could help democratize skill learning khoury.northeastern.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.