Irfan Essa is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the executive director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Tech, which he founded in 2015. 

He joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 1996. He has held numerous administrative positions, including associate dean and senior associate dean of the College of Computing, as well as interim director of the AI-Hub. He is also a core member of several interdisciplinary research centers and Institutes.

Essa is also a principal research scientist and a research director at Google Inc. within Google DeepMind. He leads the Google Atlanta Research Office, which he established in 2019. He joined Google in 2011 and led the project on Video Stabilization for YouTube.

Irfan works in the areas of computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer graphics, computational perception, robotics, computer animation, and social computing, with potential impact on autonomous systems, video analysis and production, intelligent and aware environments, human-computer interaction, computational behavioral/social Sciences, and computational journalism research. 

He has published over 250 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on these topics, and several of his papers have also won best paper awards. He was awarded the NSF CAREER award and elected to be an IEEE Fellow. He has held extended research consulting positions with Disney Research and Google Research, and was also an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.