Frank Dellaert (born September 14, 1966, in Belgium) is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.^[1] He is also affiliated with the IRIM@GT center and is well known for his contributions to robotics and computer vision. He is associated with Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Sebastian Thrun and Charles Thorpe.

Having first developed an interest in robotics at the age of ten, Dellaert attended the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium from 1984 to 1989, receiving an academic engineering degree (Burg. Ir.) in electrical engineering. He subsequently attended Case Western Reserve University from 1993 to 1995, earning a master's degree in computer science and engineering. In 1995, he began studying at Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked as a research assistant and received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2001. In August of that same year, he joined the faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Frank Dellaert's research interests lie in the areas of robotics and computer vision, including Bayesian inference, Monte Carlo approximations, and methods for attaining efficiency with approximation techniques. In 1999, alongside colleagues Dieter Fox, Sebastian Thrun, and Wolfram Burgard, Dellaert helped develop the Monte Carlo localization algorithm, a probabilistic approach to mobile robot localization based on the particle filter.^[3] His methodologies for estimating and tracking robotic movements have since become a standard and popular tool in mobile robotics.

Since joining Georgia Tech, he has explored probabilistic model-based reasoning paired with randomized approximation methods in advanced sequential Monte Carlo methods, Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction from images, and Simultaneous Location and Mapping.^[4] While at Tech, he has also applied functional programming to robotics research and education, aiming to teach students how functional languages embody many computer science advancements and how well-suited they are to the field.

Dellaert's research is applied in projects such as SWAN, augmented reality research, and 4D Cities. SWAN (System for Wearable Audio Navigation) is a wearable computer system that takes in details about the web and relays certain signals to the user to assist the blind or others in low-visibility situations, and Dellaert is researching ways to improve the precision and efficiency of its awareness system.^[5] The 4D Cities project, developed by Dellaert and Grant Schindler with help from Sing Bing Kang of Microsoft Research, provides a way to view a 3D model of a city over time. By examining different images of a city from various points in time, the program is able to reconstruct a 3D model of the city corresponding to those periods.^[6]

During his stay at Carnegie Mellon University, Dellaert won a School of Computer Science Student Award. In 2005, Dellaert received a $90K NSF CAREER award for "Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods for Large Scale Correspondence Problems in Computer Vision and Robotics."^[7] In 2006, Dellaert was one of 8 Virtual Earth RFP (research for proposal) winners who each received a grant of up to $50,000. As a recipient of the grant, Dellaert will research basic digital geographics that are expected to advance the state of the art, such as the 4-D Cities project.^[8,9]