PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yasutaka Furukawa

Yasutaka Furukawa is a computer vision researcher whose multi-view stereo software turns photographs into 3D reconstructions. After a bachelor's degree at the University of Tokyo in 2001, he earned a PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 under Jean Ponce, with whom he wrote the 2007 CVPR paper "Accurate, Dense, and Robust Multi-View Stereopsis" that won the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2017. After a postdoc at the University of Washington, a software engineer job at Google and an assistant professorship at Washington University in St. Louis, he received an NSF CAREER Award in 2015, joined Simon Fraser University, coauthored House-GAN in 2020 and served as a program chair for ICCV 2023. He is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University and a principal scientist at Wayve, and his SFU group works on embodied AI, including autonomous driving.

Works
106
Citations
12,562
h-index
44
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2001–2008

    Tokyo degree, Illinois PhD

    He earns a BSc in computer science at the University of Tokyo in 2001. He completes a PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008, supervised by Jean Ponce.

  2. 2007

    Patch-based multi-view stereo

    He writes "Accurate, Dense, and Robust Multi-View Stereopsis" with Jean Ponce for CVPR 2007, a paper cited more than 3,000 times by 2020. His PMVS software, built during his PhD and extended at the University of Washington, reconstructs the 3D structure of a scene from images and camera parameters, and Industrial Light & Magic, Weta Digital and Google use it in production.

  3. 2015

    NSF CAREER Award in St. Louis

    As an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, he receives a five-year, $487,821 NSF CAREER Award in 2015 to establish a computational framework for structured indoor 3D modeling. He first works as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington and then as a software engineer at Google.

  4. 2017

    The Longuet-Higgins Prize

    He wins the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2017, a CVPR award for papers that have had a significant impact on computer vision research, for his multi-view stereo paper from CVPR 2007.

  5. 2020

    House-GAN for floorplans

    With Nelson Nauata, Kai-Hung Chang, Chin-Yi Cheng and Greg Mori, he coauthors House-GAN, a graph-constrained generative adversarial network that turns a graph of rooms and adjacencies into a house layout. The model is evaluated on 117,000 real floorplan images and is an oral presentation at ECCV 2020.

  6. 2023

    ICCV program chair

    He is one of five program chairs for ICCV 2023, with Lourdes Agapito, Kristen Grauman, Kaiming He and Ivan Laptev. He also coauthors diffusion-model papers in 2023: HouseDiffusion at CVPR 2023, and MVDiffusion and PuzzleFusion as NeurIPS 2023 spotlights.

  7. May 2024

    Wayve's Vancouver expansion

    In May 2024, he leads the expansion of the self-driving company Wayve into Vancouver as Principal Scientist, overseeing research and development of AI for autonomous driving. He is the first hire of Wayve in Vancouver.

  8. As of October 2026

    Principal scientist and professor

    He is a principal scientist at Wayve and an associate professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University, which he joined after Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a joint appointment with both, belongs to the GrUVi visual computing team, and leads an SFU group that works on embodied AI, including autonomous driving.

Career

  1. Since 2024WayvePrincipal Scientist
  2. Since 2017Simon Fraser UniversityAssociate Professor of Computing Science
  3. 2014–2017Washington University in St. LouisAssistant professor of computer science and engineering
  4. 2009–2012University of WashingtonPostdoctoral research associate
  5. 2009–2014GoogleSoftware engineer

Education

  1. 2008University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignPhD in computer science
  2. 2001University of TokyoBSc in computer science

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

  1. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Yasutaka Furukawa. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  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. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. 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.

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 Yasutaka Furukawa yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Yasutaka Furukawa - School of Computing Science - Simon Fraser University sfu.ca. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Yasutaka Furukawa's Homepage yasu-furukawa.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Visual Computing researchers receive multiple awards at CVPR - School of Computing Science - Simon Fraser University sfu.ca. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. PMVS2 di.ens.fr. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Accurate, Dense, and Robust Multi-View Stereopsis | ML Anthology mlanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Yasutaka Furukawa – CS-CAN | INFOCAN cscan-infocan.ca. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Engineering faculty receive NSF CAREER awards - The Source - WashU source.wustl.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Yasutaka Furukawa – Smart Building Technologies to Enhance Living Spaces and Create Opportunities - SFU's Big Data Hub - Simon Fraser University sfu.ca. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. [2003.06988] House-GAN: Relational Generative Adversarial Networks for Graph-constrained House Layout Generation arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. ICCV Daily 2021 - Friday rsipvision.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  11. SFU professor leads the expansion of self-driving car startup Wayve to BC - School of Computing Science - Simon Fraser University sfu.ca. Checked 20 October 2026.