My research focus is computer vision: making computers “see.” I am especially interested in using computer vision to understand the 3D world around the camera, with applications in augmented and virtual reality. I also love working with scientists from other fields to tackle interesting image processing problems involving biological and ecological data.

Short bio:

Dr. Ventura is a native of the central coast of California and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2012. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from UCSB, as well. Before joining Cal Poly, he was an assistant professor at University of Colorado Colorado Springs. He has also been a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology in Austria, in collaboration with Qualcomm Research, and worked as a research intern at the Adobe Advanced Technologies Lab in San Jose, CA. He has presented his work at several top international conferences and journals, including IEEE CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE ISMAR, and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Joint work with his colleagues has twice been awarded the best paper prize from IEEE ISMAR, the premier international augmented reality conference. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, including an NSF CRII award and an NSF CAREER award.

Prospective Students:

I advise undergraduate and graduate (M.S.) research projects in computer vision, machine learning, and virtual and augmented reality. If you are interested, please contact me via email or come by my office.

Please note that Cal Poly does not offer a Ph.D. in Computer Science, but we do offer an M.S. in Computer Science.

Fall 2024 Schedule:

Teaching schedule: MWF 10-12 and 2-4

Office Hours:

• Tuesday 3-4
• Thursday 10-11
• Friday 1-2

Office: 14-235C