Keynote Sat, Sep 12, 2026 • 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM CEST Arena Room

From Visual Recognition to Embodied AI

Jamie Shotton

Abstract

Twenty years ago, at ECCV 2006, the challenge that captivated me was teaching machines to recognize objects in the visual world. Since then, computer vision has undergone an extraordinary transformation.

Through a journey from early visual recognition, through Kinect and HoloLens, to embodied AI at Wayve, this talk will reflect on some of the technical ideas and personal lessons behind that transformation: learning rather than engineering; betting on data and compute scaling; and being careful not to confuse today’s constraints with tomorrow’s limits.

Today, the opportunity is much bigger: building systems that can understand enough of the physical world to act intelligently within it. I’ll look at autonomous driving as an early proving ground for embodied AI, and at some of the open questions on the path toward more general embodied intelligence. If the past twenty years are any guide, the boundaries of what’s possible can move faster than we expect.

Speaker

Jamie Shotton

Jamie Shotton is a leader in AI research and development, with a track record of incubating transformative new technologies and experiences from early-stage research to shipping product. He is Chief Scientist at Wayve where he leads Wayve Labs, building foundation models for embodied intelligence, such as GAIA and LINGO, to enable safe and adaptable autonomous vehicles and other robots. Prior to Wayve he was Partner Director of Science at Microsoft and head of the Mixed Reality & AI Labs where he shipped foundational features including body tracking for Kinect and the hand- and eye-tracking for HoloLens. He has explored both fundamental research and applications of AI across autonomous driving, robotics, mixed reality, virtual presence, human-computer interaction, gaming, robotics, and healthcare. He has received multiple Best Paper and Best Demo awards at top-tier academic conferences, and the Longuet-Higgins Prize test-of-time award at CVPR 2021. His work on Kinect was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s gold medal MacRobert Award in 2011, and he shares Microsoft’s Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for 2012 with the Kinect engineering team. In 2014 he received the PAMI Young Researcher Award, and in 2015 the MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 Award. He was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal in 2020 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021.