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Cordelia Schmid

Research Director, WILLOW project team, Inria

  • Research Director, WILLOW project team, Inria1
  • Joint appointment with Google Research (since 2018), Google Research1

Cordelia Schmid is a research director at Inria, where Schmid has held a permanent research position since 1997, and works in the WILLOW project team of Inria and DI ENS. Since 2018 Schmid has held a joint appointment with Google Research. Schmid's video and language research includes co-authorship of VideoBERT (2019), a joint model for video and language representation learning, and ViViT (2021), a video vision transformer. Schmid has served as editor-in-chief of IJCV (2013–2018) and as general chair of IEEE CVPR 2015, ECCV 2020, and ICCV 2023.123

At a glance

Current roles
Research Director, WILLOW project team +1 more
Companies
Inria, Google
Sector
Government lab or agency
Education
Oxford
Work listed
2
Honors
12
Sources cited
3
Profile reviewed

Career

Cordelia Schmid's doctoral thesis at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, on local greyvalue invariants for image matching and retrieval, received INPG's best thesis award in 1996. Schmid was then a post-doctoral research assistant in the Robotics Research Group at Oxford University in 1996–1997, and since 1997 has held a permanent research position at Inria, where Schmid is a research director in the WILLOW project team of Inria Paris and DI ENS.1

Schmid received the Habilitation in 2001 for a thesis titled "From Image Matching to Learning Visual Models". Starting in 2018, Schmid has held a joint appointment with Google Research.1

Research

Schmid's research is in computer vision; Schmid's doctoral and habilitation theses ran from image matching and retrieval to learning visual models. Schmid also co-authored VideoBERT (2019), which learns joint visual-linguistic representations from unlabeled video, and ViViT (2021), a pure-transformer model for video classification presented at ICCV 2021.123

Editorial and community service

Schmid has been an associate editor of IEEE PAMI (2001–2005) and of IJCV (2004–2012), and editor-in-chief of IJCV from 2013 to 2018. Schmid was a program chair of IEEE CVPR 2005 and ECCV 2012 and a general chair of IEEE CVPR 2015, ECCV 2020 and ICCV 2023, and is listed as a general chair of ECCV 2028.1

Work and contributions

  • ViViT Published research

    Co-author of "ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer" (2021) with Anurag Arnab, Mostafa Dehghani, Georg Heigold, Chen Sun, and Mario Lučić.3

  • VideoBERT Published research

    Co-author of "VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning" (2019) with Chen Sun, Austin Myers, Carl Vondrick, and Kevin Murphy.2

Timeline

  1. Received the INPG best thesis award for a doctoral thesis on local greyvalue invariants for image matching.1
  2. Took up a permanent research position at Inria after a postdoc in Oxford's Robotics Research Group.1
  3. Received the Habilitation for the thesis "From Image Matching to Learning Visual Models".1
  4. Became editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision, serving until 2018.1
  5. Served as general chair of IEEE CVPR 2015.1
  6. Began a joint appointment with Google Research alongside the Inria position.1
  7. Co-authored VideoBERT, a joint model for video and language representation learning.2
  8. Co-authored ViViT, a video vision transformer presented at ICCV 2021.3
  9. Served as general chair of ICCV 2023.1

Honors and recognition

  • Longuet-Higgins Prize (also 2006 and 2014) · IEEE Computer Society (CVPR), 20161
  • Koenderink Prize · European Conference on Computer Vision, 20181
  • Humboldt Research Award · Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 20151
  • Inria – French Academy of Sciences Grand Prix · Inria and the French Academy of Sciences, 20161
  • Milner Award · The Royal Society, 20201
  • PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award · IEEE Computer Society PAMI Technical Committee, 20211
  • Helmholtz Prize · IEEE Computer Society (ICCV), 20231
  • Körber European Science Prize · Körber Foundation, 20231
  • European Inventor Award (Research category) · European Patent Office, 20241
  • ACM Athena Lecturer Award · Association for Computing Machinery, 20251
  • IEEE Fellow · Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers1
  • Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina · German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina1

Where they work

  • Inria 1 person in the wiki
  • Google 121 people in the wiki

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References

3 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Cordelia Schmid — homepage and short bioCordelia Schmid · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning (arXiv 1904.01766)arXiv · Paper · published Apr 3, 2019 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer (arXiv 2103.15691)arXiv · Paper · published Mar 29, 2021 · accessed Oct 21, 2026