Raquel Urtasun is the Founder and CEO of Waabi. A world-renowned expert within the field of AI, Raquel is pioneering the application of generative AI technology to build innovative self-driving solutions. Raquel is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and co-founded the Vector Institute for AI together with Geoff Hinton. Over her 25 year career within AI, she has been the recipient of several high profile and prestigious awards including a Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award), an Everingham Prize, an NSERC EWR Steacie Award (best scientist in Canada), two NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Awards, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two Best Paper Awards at CVPR, the leading conference in computer vision, and more. She has published more than 200 papers in AI, which have been cited more than 70,000 times, giving her an h-index of 117, and she has filed more than 100 patents in AI for self-driving.
Prior to founding Waabi, Raquel was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG and a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Raquel received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley. In 2024, Raquel was included on the CNBC Changemakers: Women Transforming Business list. In 2023, she was named one of the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, made Business Insider’s AI 100 list of Top People in AI, and was awarded the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Emerging Tech CEO Award and the Order of Ontario, the highest civilian honor in the province. In 2021, she was named one of the 100 Women of Impact by Entrepreneur Magazine, 100 People Transforming Business by Business Insider, and Toronto’s Most Influential Torontonians according to Toronto Life Magazine. She was also named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the Year and 2018 Toronto's top influencers by Adweek magazine.
