PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Serge Belongie

Serge Belongie is a computer vision researcher whose work connects machine learning with human expertise. After studying at Caltech and Berkeley, he taught at UC San Diego and helped establish Cornell Tech. His work includes Microsoft COCO for object recognition and scene understanding, Visipedia for image search, and Merlin for bird identification. He moved to Copenhagen to direct the Pioneer Centre for AI and became president of the ELLIS board. As of October 2026, he is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen; his honours include the Koenderink Prize, and a team he led with Pietro Perona received the 2026 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize.

Now at
Pioneer Centre for AI and University of Copenhagen
Works
367
Citations
139,171
h-index
102

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Serge Belongie

Timeline

  1. 1995–2000

    Studying electrical engineering

    He received a B.S. with honor in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1995 and a Ph.D. in EECS from Berkeley in 2000.

  2. 2001–2020

    Across two computer science faculties

    From 2001 to 2013, he was a professor in computer science and engineering at UC San Diego. At Cornell Tech, he helped establish the campus and joined its faculty in 2013.

  3. 2014

    A dataset for scene understanding

    With Tsung-Yi Lin and other coauthors, he published Microsoft COCO in 2014. The dataset aimed to advance object recognition by placing it in the context of scene understanding.

  4. September 2014

    An encyclopedia for image search

    In September 2014, Cornell Tech reported on Visipedia, a searchable visual encyclopedia for images. Belongie and Pietro Perona developed it with machine learning and crowdsourced expertise for image classification.

  5. December 2016

    A machine-learning bird guide

    The Merlin Bird Photo ID app launched as a computer-vision tool for identifying North American bird species from photos. Belongie worked on Merlin, where deep learning later changed its identification process.

  6. 2021

    Moving to Copenhagen

    He moved from New York to Copenhagen to direct the new Pioneer Centre for AI. In autumn 2021, the centre’s research projects were underway across five universities with goals for social impact in health and biotech.

  7. 2024–2025

    Leading the ELLIS board

    ELLIS announced a new board led by Belongie in October 2024. By 2025, he was president of the board.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research and recognition

    He is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Pioneer Centre for AI; he is an ELLIS Fellow. His honours include the Koenderink Prize for fundamental contributions to computer vision. In 2026, the Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Challenge Series team he led with Pietro Perona received the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize.

Sources and credits

Photo: Dicklyon, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Cornell Tech - Serge Belongie tech.cornell.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Cornell Tech - Human-in-the-Loop: Adding an Expert’s Touch to Machine Learning tech.cornell.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context | Computational Vision | UC Irvine vision.ics.uci.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. [1405.0312] Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Cornell Tech - Building a Visual Search Engine tech.cornell.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. AI4Science @ Caltech ai4science.caltech.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Cornell Tech - Merlin Bird Photo ID Mobile App Launches tech.cornell.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. How bird’s species made new Professor Serge Belongie world-famous within Computer Vision – University of Copenhagen di.ku.dk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. The Danish Pioneer Centre for AI marks its official opening – University of Copenhagen di.ku.dk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. American AI expert sets his sights on Europe: New leadership at ELLIS | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems ellis.eu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  11. Meet the Board: Serge Belongie | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems ellis.eu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  12. Serge Belongie | Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence aicentre.dk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  13. Serge Belongie serge.belongie.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  14. The Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) Challenge Series Team awarded the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize | News | Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence aicentre.dk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  15. Serge Belongie | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems ellis.eu. Checked 14 October 2026.