DrTolga Birdal

Tolga Birdal is an assistant professor (Lecturer) and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Computing of Imperial College London, where he leads the CIRCLE group: circle-group.github.io.

His current foci of interest involve topological deep learning, geometric machine learning and 3D computer vision. More theoretical work is aimed at investigating and interrogating limits in geometric computing and non-Euclidean inference as well as principles of deep learning.

Besides various industrial partnerships, Tolga is a (Co-)PI in the following projects:
- [UKRI-EPSRC] UNTOLD: Unifying Foundations for Topological Deep Learning (Future Leaders Fellowship - PI)
- [Royal Society] Topological Deep Learning for Drug Discovery (PI)
- [EPSRC] GNOMON: Deep Generative Models in non-Euclidean Spaces for Computer Vision & Graphics (Co-PI)

Tolga acts as an Area Chair for various computer vision conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and serves as the publication chair of 3DV 2025. He has several publications at the well-respected venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICLR, ICML, ECCV, T-PAMI, ICRA, IROS, ICASSP and 3DV.

Previously, he was a senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University within the Geometric Computing Group of Prof. Leonidas Guibas. Tolga has defended his masters and Ph.D. theses at the Computer Vision Group under Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich led by Prof. Nassir Navab. He was also a Doktorand at Siemens AG under supervision of Dr. Slobodan Ilic working on “Geometric Methods for 3D Reconstruction from Large Point Clouds”. With this thesis, Tolga received the prestigious Young Professional Award granted by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA).

Aside from his academic life, Tolga has co-founded multiple companies including Befunky (https://befunky.com), a widely used web-based image editing platform.