Irfan Essa is an Associate Professor in the Interactive & Intelligent Computing (IIC) Division of the College of Computing (CoC), and Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech), in Atlanta, Georgia.

Irfan Essa works in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Computational Perception, Robotics and Computer Animation, with potential impact on Video Analysis and Production (e.g., Computational Photography, Image-based Modeling and Rendering, etc.) Human Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence research. Specifically, he is interested in the analysis, interpretation, authoring, and synthesis (of video), with the goals of building aware environments, recognizing, modeling human activities, and behaviors, and developing dynamic and generative representations of time-varying streams.

He teaches classes in the areas of Computer Vision, Computational Perception, Computer Animation, and Digital Video Special Effects.

At Tech, he is primarily affiliated with two interdepartmental centers; the Robotics & Machine Intelligence (RIM@GT) Center and the GVU Center. He founded the Computational Perception Laboratory (CPL) at GA Tech in 1996, which he now co-directs with 4 other faculty members. He is also the founding member of the Aware Home Research Initiative (AHRI). He also started an effort on Digital Video Special Effects & Animation (DVFX). In addition, he is affiliated with the CERCS and the Broadband Institute at GA Tech. He helped establish a new BS in Computational Media (CM) Degree at GA Tech and is affiliated with the new PhD program in Human Centered Computing (HCC) and is involved with the new Initiatives in Robotics at GA Tech.

He joined GA Tech Faculty in 1996 after his earning his MS (1990), Ph.D. (1994), and holding research faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Media Lab) [1988-1996]. His Doctoral Research was in the area of Facial Recognition, Analysis, and Synthesis.