Prior to joining CMU, he was an associate professor at UC Irvine. His research interests span computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on visual recognition. He was awarded the David Marr Prize in 2009, the PASCAL VOC Lifetime Achievement Prize in 2010, an NSF Career Award in 2010, the UCI Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in 2011, the PAMI Young Researcher Award in 2012, and was selected as one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10 researchers in 2012. His work is supported by NSF, ONR, DARPA, as well as industrial collaborations with the Intel, Google, and Microsoft.