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Portrait of Sanja Fidler
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Sanja Fidler

Associate Professor, University of Toronto

  • Associate Professor, University of Toronto142
  • Co-founder and affiliated faculty, Vector Institute1
  • Vice President of AI Research (from March 2022; earlier Director of AI and Sr. Director of AI), NVIDIA21

Sanja Fidler is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and an affiliated faculty member of the Vector Institute, where Fidler was one of the co-founding members. Fidler's research is in computer vision and machine learning, especially where vision meets graphics: 3D vision, 3D reconstruction and synthesis, and interactive methods for image annotation. Fidler is also Vice President of AI Research at NVIDIA, leading a research lab, after joining NVIDIA in May 2018 as Director of AI. Fidler is a co-author of the 2025 Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform paper, whose abstract says the platform is open-source with open-weight models under permissive licenses.123

At a glance

Current roles
Associate Professor +2 more
Sector
University
Education
UC Berkeley, Toronto
Work listed
1
Honors
6
Sources cited
4
Profile reviewed

Career

Fidler completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Ljubljana in 2010, then spent 2010 as a visiting scientist at UC Berkeley and ICSI with Trevor Darrell and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto with Sven Dickinson. From 2012 to 2014 Fidler was a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.21

Fidler joined the University of Toronto faculty in 2014, became a tenure-track assistant professor in 2016 and has been an associate professor since July 2020; Fidler was also one of the co-founding members of the Vector Institute. At NVIDIA, Fidler was Director of AI from May 2018, Senior Director of AI from July 2021 and has been Vice President of AI Research since March 2022, leading a research lab.214

Research

Fidler's research lies where computer vision meets graphics, covering 3D vision, 3D reconstruction and synthesis, multimodal representations and human-in-the-loop image annotation. With Lluis Castrejon, Kaustav Kundu and Raquel Urtasun, Fidler co-wrote Polygon-RNN for annotating object instances, which received a best paper honorable mention at CVPR 2017.12

At NVIDIA, Fidler co-authored the 2025 paper on the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for physical AI, which presents pre-trained world foundation models, a video curation pipeline and video tokenizers, with the models released open-weight under permissive licenses.3

Work and contributions

  • NVIDIA Cosmos Open weights

    Listed among the authors of "Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI" (January 2025), which presents NVIDIA's world foundation models, video curation pipeline and tokenizers and states that the models are released open-weight under permissive licenses.3

Timeline

  1. Completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Ljubljana.2
  2. Became a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.2
  3. Joined the University of Toronto as an assistant professor.2
  4. Received a CVPR 2017 best paper honorable mention for Polygon-RNN.2
  5. Named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.2
  6. Joined NVIDIA as Director of AI.2
  7. Became an associate professor at the University of Toronto.2
  8. Became Senior Director of AI at NVIDIA.2
  9. Became Vice President of AI Research at NVIDIA.2
  10. Co-authored the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform paper for physical AI.3

Honors and recognition

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair · CIFAR, 20182
  • Connaught Innovation Award · University of Toronto, 20202
  • Connaught New Researcher Award · University of Toronto, 20182
  • CVPR Best Paper Honorable Mention · IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 20172
  • Facebook Faculty Award · Facebook, 20162
  • Amazon Academic Research Award · Amazon21

Where they work

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References

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

  1. Sanja Fidler — homepage (University of Toronto)Sanja Fidler · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Sanja Fidler — CV (employment history)Sanja Fidler · Official page · published Oct 30, 2023 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI (arXiv 2501.03575)arXiv · Paper · published Jan 7, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. Faculty Directory — Department of Computer Science, University of TorontoUniversity of Toronto · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026