Presenter

Sanja Fidler is vice president of AI research at NVIDIA, leading the company’s Spatial Intelligence Lab. She is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and an affiliate faculty member at the Vector Institute, which she co-founded. Fidler co-authored over 130 scientific papers in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and NLP. She has served as Area Chair for a variety of conferences, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), International Conference in Computer Vision (ICCV), the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and SIGGRAPH.

Fidler has received the NVIDIA Pioneer of AI Award, Amazon Academic Research Award, Facebook Faculty Award, Early Researcher Award, University of Toronto’s Innovation Award, and the Connaught New Researcher Award. In 2018, she was appointed as the Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. She has also been ranked among the top three most influential AI female researchers in Canada by Re-WORK, was named in Globe and Mail’s Changemakers in 2025, and was listed in the top people in AI in 2023 by the Business Insider. With her co-workers, she received the Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CVPR’17, SIGGRAPH 2023, and Best Paper Award at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. Her main research interests are in spatial intelligence: 3D content creation, spatial understanding, and simulation for robotics.