Yong Jae Lee is a
Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. His core research interests are in computer
vision and machine learning, with a focus on creating robust AI systems that can learn to understand
our multimodal world with minimal
human supervision. Before joining UW-Madison in 2021, he spent one
year as an AI Visiting Faculty at Cruise, and before that, six
years as an Assistant and then Associate Professor at UC Davis. He
received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012
advised by Kristen Grauman, and was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon
University (2012-2013) and UC Berkeley (2013-2014) advised by
Alyosha Efros. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He is a
recipient of the Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator
Program (YIP) Award (2017), UC Davis Hellman Fellowship (2017),
National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award (2018), AWS Machine
Learning Research Awards (2018, 2019), Adobe Data Science Research
Awards (2019, 2022), UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding
Junior Faculty Award (2019), Sony Focused Research Awards (2020,
2023), UW-Madison SACM Student Choice Professor of the Year Award
(2022), Susan Beth Horwitz Professorship
(2025), and H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2025). He
and his collaborators received the Most Innovative Award at the
COCO Object Detection Challenge ICCV 2019 and the Best Paper Award
at BMVC 2020.