Federico Tombari

Dr. habil Federico Tombari leads Google’s research in 3D computer vision, advancing multimodal models and autonomous perception.

Professional profile

Federico Tombari is the Director of Research at Google Zurich, where he leads an international team of scientists across the US, Switzerland, and Germany to bridge the gap between theoretical machine learning and applied computer vision. Simultaneously, he maintains a strong academic presence as a lecturer at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), ensuring a continuous exchange of ideas between industrial innovation and academic rigor.

In the sphere of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Tombari is a specialist in 3D computer vision and large multimodal models. His research delves into complex areas such as scene understanding, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and 3D object recognition. By developing unsupervised learning techniques for visual data, he enables AI systems to interpret the three-dimensional world more like humans do—understanding not just what objects are, but their spatial relationships and semantic context within a scene.

Dr. Tombari’s expertise has been instrumental to a wide array of industry leaders. He has served as a Principal Investigator for Toyota, BMW, and Audi, developing the deep learning technology required for autonomous driving and service robotics. From enhancing 3D perception for Google’s Project Tango to advancing AI for retinal microsurgery with Zeiss, his work demonstrates the versatile power of AI to transform navigation, augmented reality, and high-precision healthcare.