Thomas Serre
Thomas Serre is a professor at Brown University, and his work connects brain-inspired models of vision with machine vision. He earned an MSc at Télécom Bretagne in 2000 and a neuroscience PhD at MIT in 2006. In 2005 he and his coauthors Lior Wolf and Tomaso Poggio introduced object-recognition features motivated by a quantitative model of visual cortex. He and his team received the 2021 PAMI Helmholtz Prize and the 2022 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize for their work on human action recognition. As of October 2026, he serves as faculty director of the Center for Computation and Visualization at Brown.
- Now at
- Brown University
- Works
- 16
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.
Timeline
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2000–2006
An MSc and an MIT PhD
He completes an MSc in electrical engineering and computer science at Télécom Bretagne in France in 2000. He then earns a PhD in neuroscience from MIT in 2006.
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2005
Features inspired by visual cortex
With Lior Wolf and Tomaso Poggio, he introduces object-recognition features at CVPR 2005, motivated by a quantitative model of visual cortex.
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2011
The HMDB motion video database
He co-authors the HMDB paper, a large video database for human motion recognition, which appears at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.
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2014
An NSF CAREER Award
He receives an NSF CAREER Award as an assistant professor at Brown, and the university announces the award in April 2014.
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2021–2022
Helmholtz and Everingham prizes
He and his team receive the 2021 PAMI Helmholtz Prize and the 2022 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize for their work on human action recognition.
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2021–2026
Deputy editor at PLOS Computational Biology
He holds the posts of deputy editor and neuroscience section editor at PLOS Computational Biology from 2021 to 2026.
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2023
The CRAFT explainability method
He co-authors CRAFT, a CVPR 2023 method that generates concept-based explanations to identify both what a vision model saw and where it looked.
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As of October 2026
A Watson professorship at Brown
He is Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown and serves as faculty director of the Center for Computation and Visualization. He develops brain-inspired models and benchmarks that compare human and machine vision.
Sources and credits
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- Serre, Thomas
- Object Recognition with Features Inspired by Visual Cortex | ML Anthology
- HMDB: A Large Video Database for Human Motion Recognition | ML Anthology
- Three faculty receive NSF CAREER Awards | News from Brown
- Thomas Serre
- CRAFT: Concept Recursive Activation FacTorization for Explainability