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Josef Sivic

Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; head of the IMPACT group, Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC), Czech Technical University

  • Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; head of the IMPACT group, Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC), Czech Technical University1
  • Consulting, Adobe Research1
  • Chief Strategy Officer (part-time), Tolion Health AI1

Josef Sivic is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) of the Czech Technical University (CTU), where Sivic leads the Intelligent Machine Perception (IMPACT) group and directs an ELLIS unit. Sivic's research spans computer vision, robotics, and AI for the life sciences, including models for protein engineering. Sivic's site lists consulting for Adobe Research and a part-time Chief Strategy Officer role at Tolion Health AI, as well as an earlier postdoc at MIT CSAIL with William Freeman. Sivic is a co-author of NetVLAD (2015) and HowTo100M (2019).123

At a glance

Current roles
Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; head of the IMPACT group +2 more
Sector
University
Education
MIT, Oxford
Work listed
2
Honors
3
Sources cited
3
Profile reviewed

Career

Sivic completed a PhD at the University of Oxford in 2006 with Andrew Zisserman, did a postdoc at MIT CSAIL with William Freeman, and received a habilitation from the Ecole Normale Superieure in 2014. Sivic taught Object Recognition and Computer Vision at ENS from 2008 to 2019 and has taught 3D Computer Vision at Charles University since 2019.1

At CIIRC CTU, Sivic leads the IMPACT group and directs the ELLIS Unit Prague, inaugurated in 2020 and now becoming a countrywide ELLIS Unit Czechia. In 2026 Sivic was appointed full Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence by the President of the Czech Republic and took a part-time Chief Strategy Officer role at Tolion Health AI.1

Research

Sivic's group works on systems that interpret multimodal inputs with little supervision, across computer vision, robotics and AI for the life sciences. Vision work includes NetVLAD for place recognition (2015), HowTo100M for learning text-video embeddings from narrated videos (2019), and later work on object state changes and 6D object trajectories from internet videos.123

In robotics, the group's CosyPose method won awards at the ECCV 2020 6D object pose estimation challenge, and the team joined the euROBIN robotics network in 2022. Life-science work covers protein-protein interactions (ICLR 2024), protein flexibility (ICLR 2025), the MassSpecGym benchmark for molecule discovery (NeurIPS 2024) and DreaMS, a mass-spectra representation model published in Nature Biotechnology in 2025.1

Work and contributions

  • NetVLAD Published research

    Co-author of "NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition" (2015) with Relja Arandjelović, Petr Gronat, Akihiko Torii, and Tomas Pajdla.2

  • HowTo100M Published research

    Co-author of "HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips" (2019).3

Timeline

  1. Completed a PhD at the University of Oxford with Andrew Zisserman.1
  2. Began teaching Object Recognition and Computer Vision at the Ecole Normale Superieure, through 2019.1
  3. Received a habilitation from the Ecole Normale Superieure and began an ERC Starting Grant.1
  4. Co-authored NetVLAD, a CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition.2
  5. Co-authored HowTo100M, on learning text-video embeddings from narrated video clips.3
  6. The ELLIS Unit Prague at CIIRC CTU, directed by Sivic, was inaugurated.1
  7. Was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for FRONTIER, on federated foundational models for embodied perception.1
  8. Appointed full Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence by the President of the Czech Republic.1

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

Honors and recognition

  • Czech AI Award · Czech AI Awards, 20231
  • Ordre des Palmes Académiques · French Republic, 20251
  • ERC Advanced Grant (FRONTIER) · European Research Council, 20241

Where they work

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References

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

  1. Josef Sivic — homepage (CIIRC CTU)Josef Sivic · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition (arXiv 1511.07247)arXiv · Paper · published Nov 23, 2015 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips (arXiv 1906.03327)arXiv · Paper · published Jun 7, 2019 · accessed Oct 21, 2026