PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Sameer Agarwal

Sameer Agarwal is a computer vision researcher and Google engineer who builds optimization software and 3D reconstruction systems. After a 2006 Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, he led the 2009 Building Rome in a Day paper at the University of Washington, which reconstructed Rome in 3D from 150,000 Flickr photos in 21 hours. Around 2010, he and Keir Mierle began replacing a custom bundle adjuster at Google, and Ceres Solver went open source in May 2012. The Rome paper won the Helmholtz Prize in 2019, and in 2022 he published An Atlas for the Pinhole Camera with Timothy Duff, Max Lieblich and Rekha Thomas. He is an engineer at Google in Seattle and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, working on computer vision with methods from optimization and algebra.

Works
48
Citations
5,987
h-index
26
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2006

    A Ph.D. at UC San Diego

    He earns a Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego in 2006, with the dissertation Learning from Higher Order Relations under advisor Serge Belongie. In 2006, he also coauthors Higher-Order Learning with Graphs at ICML with Kristin Branson and Belongie.

  2. 2009

    Building Rome in a Day

    At the University of Washington, where he is an acting assistant professor of computer science and engineering, he is lead author of Building Rome in a Day, presented at ICCV 2009 in Kyoto with Noah Snavely, Ian Simon, Steven M. Seitz and Richard Szeliski. The system matches 150,000 Flickr photos of Rome and reconstructs the city in 3D in 21 hours.

  3. 2010

    Bundle adjustment at Google

    Around 2010, he and Keir Mierle decide to replace a custom bundle adjuster at Google with something more modern. In 2010, he also coauthors Bundle Adjustment in the Large with Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz and Richard Szeliski; the paper presents an Inexact Newton bundle adjustment algorithm that uses less time and memory than standard Schur complement methods.

  4. May 2012

    Ceres Solver goes open source

    In May 2012, he and Keir Mierle, Geo software engineers at Google, release Ceres Solver as open source. Google uses the portable C++ library for nonlinear least squares to estimate the pose of Street View cars, aircraft and satellites.

  5. 2016

    Jump: Virtual Reality Video

    In 2016, he is one of the authors of Jump: Virtual Reality Video, published in ACM Transactions on Graphics and presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2016, with Robert Anderson, David Gallup, Jonathan T. Barron, Janne Kontkanen, Noah Snavely, Carlos H. Esteban and Steven M. Seitz.

  6. 2019

    The Helmholtz Prize

    At ICCV 2019 in Seoul, he, Noah Snavely, Ian Simon, Steven M. Seitz and Richard Szeliski receive the Helmholtz Prize for Building Rome in a Day. The prize, one of two awarded at ICCV 2019, recognizes 2009 papers with significant impact on computer vision research.

  7. 2022

    An Atlas for the Pinhole Camera

    In 2022, he publishes An Atlas for the Pinhole Camera in Foundations of Computational Mathematics with Timothy Duff, Max Lieblich and Rekha R. Thomas. He also publishes The Chiral Domain of a Camera Arrangement in the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision with Andrew Pryhuber, Rainer Sinn and Thomas.

  8. As of October 2026

    Google engineer and UW affiliate

    He is an engineer at Google in Seattle and an affiliate professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His work applies methods from optimization and algebra to problems in computer vision.

Career

  1. Since 2010GoogleEngineer
  2. Since 2009University of WashingtonActing Assistant Professor

Education

  1. 2006University of California, San DiegoPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Building Rome in a day2011 · Communications of the ACM · 1,074 citationsWith Noah Snavely, Richard Szeliski and Steven Seitz
  2. Multicore bundle adjustment2011 · 827 citationsWith Changchang Wu and Steven Seitz
  3. Bundle Adjustment in the Large2010 · Lecture notes in computer science · 478 citationsWith Noah Snavely, Richard Szeliski and Steven Seitz
  4. Higher order learning with graphs2006 · International Conference on Machine Learning · 389 citationsWith Serge Belongie
  5. Beyond Pairwise Clustering2005 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 249 citationsWith Jongwoo Lim, Lihi Zelnik-Manor, Pietro Perona and Serge Belongie

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Sameer Agarwal. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. 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.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Google. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

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 Sameer Agarwal yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Sameer Agarwal - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Higher-Order Learning with Graphs | Vision vision.ucsd.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Rome was built in a day, with hundreds of thousands of digital photos | UW News washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Building Rome in a Day grail.cs.washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. docs/source/about.rst - ceres-solver - Git at Google ceres-solver.googlesource.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Bundle Adjustment in the Large grail.cs.washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Introducing Ceres Solver - A Nonlinear Least Squares Solver | Google Open Source Blog opensource.googleblog.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Sameer Agarwal : Papers homes.cs.washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Allen School researchers build Rome in a day, receive Helmholtz Prize at ICCV 2019 news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Sameer Agarwal homes.cs.washington.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.