Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in the Robotics Institute, has received a Bosch Young Faculty Fellowship to support his research on computer vision and large-scale visual learning. The fellowship, which includes a $45,000 gift for the first year, is renewable for up to three years.

Gupta, who came to the Robotics Institute in 2009 as a post-doctoral researcher and joined its faculty in 2011, leads the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) project. The computer program constantly searches the Web for images, doing its best to identify objects and characterize scenes on its own. As NEIL builds a massive visual database, it also gains common sense as it makes associations between the information it gleans from the images.

CNN named NEIL one of the Top 10 Ideas of 2013. Google recently provided a Faculty Research Award to continue its support for the project and Yahoo has donated a 900-core computing cluster for the project’s use.

Gupta earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering in 2004 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Maryland in 2009.