James M. Rehg (pronounced “ray”) is a Founder Professor of Computer Science and Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Previously, he was a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he co-Directed the Center for Health Analytics and Informatics (CHAI). He received his Ph.D. from CMU in 1995 and worked at the Cambridge Research Lab of DEC (and then Compaq) from 1995-2001, where he managed the computer vision research group. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2001 and a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship from Georgia Tech in 2005. He and his students have received a number of best paper awards, including best student paper awards at ICML 2005, BMVC 2010, Mobihealth 2014, Face and Gesture 2015, and a Distinguished Paper Award from ACM IMWUT and a Method of the Year award from the journal Nature Methods. Dr. Rehg served as the General co-Chair for CVPR 2009 and the Program co-Chair for CVPR 2017. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds 26 issued US patents.
We conduct foundational research in computer vision and machine learning, with broad applications in human-centered and interdisciplinary domains. Our work spans developmental and social psychology, autism research, mobile health, and robotics. A central theme of our work is understanding human social and cognitive behavior. We develop novel sensing technologies and computational models that capture behavior in real-world contexts and connect health-related behaviors to clinical outcomes, enabling new forms of assessment and treatment. In addition, we explore machine learning paradigms inspired by child development, and biologically-inspired methods for robot perception, navigation, and control. Our recent work has expanded to multimodal foundation models, social AI, and large-scale video datasets such as Ego4D, reflecting a broader vision at the intersection of human behavior, health, and intelligent systems.
Prospective Students: We welcome Masters and undergraduate students, as well as (remote) global interns. If you are interested in joining our group and are a current/incoming UIUC student, please fill out this form. If you are not currently at UIUC, please apply directly to the university.