Marc Pollefeys is Director of the Mixed Reality and AI Zurich Lab and the Director of Science leading a team of scientist and engineers to develop advanced perception capabilities for HoloLens at Microsoft. He is also a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2012.  Pollefeys, is also actively involved with the Swiss Joint Research Center, a collaborative research engagement between Microsoft Research and two universities ETH Zurich and EPFL.

He is best known for his work in 3D computer vision, having been the first to develop a software pipeline to automatically turn photographs into 3D models, but also works on robotics, graphics and machine learning problems.  Other noteworthy projects he worked on with collaborators at UNC Chapel Hill and ETH Zurich are real-time 3D scanning with mobile devices, a real-time pipeline for 3D reconstruction of cities from vehicle mounted-cameras, camera-based self-driving cars and the first fully autonomous vision-based drone.  Most recently his academic research has focused on combining 3D reconstruction with semantic scene understanding.  He has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications and holds several patents.  His lab at ETH Zurich also developed the PixHawk auto-pilot which can be found in over half a million drones and he has co-founded several computer vision start-ups.