Rogerio Schmidt Feris is a principal scientist and senior manager at the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab. He joined IBM in 2006 after receiving a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also worked as an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington and as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University. He has authored over 200 technical papers and holds over 60 issued patents in the areas of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning.
His work has not only been published in top AI conferences, but has also been integrated into multiple IBM products. He led the development of an attribute-based visual search system used by many police departments around the world, as well as a system that produced auto-curated highlights and AI commentary for the US Open, Wimbledon, and Masters tournaments, which were seen by millions of fans worldwide. The sports highlights work earned him a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award, given for breakthroughs in technology that have a significant effect on television engineering. More recently, he led the release of the Granite Vision foundation model family, which have surpassed 3 million downloads in a year. Rogerio's work has been covered by the New York Times, ABC News, CBS 60 Minutes, and many other media outlets. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2026. He is also an IBM Master Inventor and has received two IBM Corporate Awards and multiple IBM Research Accomplishment Awards.
Rogerio has served as a global co-lead for the Joint Program between Research and Watson Visual Services, as well as for the multimodal perception area at IBM, coordinating efforts across labs worldwide. He was the Principal Investigator for the IBM-MIT team on DARPA Learning with Less Labels and for the IBM-MIT-Purdue team on IARPA DIVA. He has served as an Associate Editor of TPAMI and as Program Chair of WACV 2017, and regularly serves as an Area Chair or Senior Area Chair at top-tier AI conferences. Rogerio is originally from Brazil and has contributed to the LatinX in AI events.