Dr. Holger Caesar, Assistant Professor

Intelligent Vehicles Lab, TU Delft

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have come a long way in the past two decades. Yet they are nowhere close to safely carrying our children to an arbitrary location. Until AVs become a net provider of safety, comfort and reduced carbon emissions, a lot of work remains to be done. The real world is full of challenging corner-cases and unexpected behavior. My research focuses on finding more scalable approaches to address these corner cases by collecting, mining, labeling, training from and evaluating sensor data more cleverly.

Latest news

  • 11.2022: Our ICLR 2023 workshop proposal "Scene Representations for Autonomous Driving" was accepted

  • 11.2022: Holger becomes an ELLIS member

  • 11.2022: Awarded a TKI grant for 502k EUR, co-sponsored by Motional and the top sector High Tech Systems and Materials

  • 10.2022: Keynote at the "Workshop on Learning from Limited and Imperfect Data" at ECCV 2022 in Tel Aviv

  • 10.2022: Yancong joins the group as postdoc, Ted joins as PhD

  • 07.2022: One PhD position available. Update: Position closed!

  • 06.2022: Two keynotes at the 33rd IEEE Intelligent Vehicles (IV) Symposium at workshops on unsupervised learning and map-less driving. See you there!

  • 05.2022: One paper published at the 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

  • 05.2022: One PhD and one PostDoc position available. Update: Positions closed!

  • 04.2022: Started as Assistant Professor at TU Delft

Topics

  • Outperforming the state-of-the-art in

    • 3d detection/tracking

    • Prediction/planning

    • Segmentation/mapping

  • Use of prior knowledge to solve these tasks

  • Lesser forms of supervision (self, weakly or semi supervised)

  • Active learning and partial labeling techniques to select which data to annotate

  • Domain adaptation and transfer learning

  • Sensor fusion

  • Collaborative perception

  • Semantic mapping

Vacancies

There are currently no open vacancies. For student projects and theses, please see the Education page.

Biography

Dr. Holger Caesar is an Assistant Professor at the Intelligent Vehicles group of TU Delft in the Netherlands. The Intelligent Vehicles group is led by Prof. Dr. Dariu Gavrila and part of the Cognitive Robotics department. Holger's research interests are in the area of Autonomous Vehicle perception and prediction, with a particular focus on scalability of learning and annotation approaches. Previously Holger was a Principal Research Scientist at an autonomous vehicle company called Motional (formerly nuTonomy). There he started 3 teams with 20+ members that focused on Data Annotation, Autolabeling and Data Mining. Holger also developed the influential autonomous driving datasets nuScenes and nuPlan and contributed to the commonly used PointPillars baseline for 3d object detection from lidar data.


Holger received a PhD in Computer Vision from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland under Prof. Dr. Vittorio Ferrari and studied in Germany and Switzerland (KIT Karlsruhe, EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich). In his spare time he likes to hike with his small family, as well as sing, run or cross the Alps by mountainbike.