About & CV

Itzik Ben Shabat
CV PDF

I am currently a Senior Scientist at Roblox. Before that, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National Universit (ANU) and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology as part of my Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (MSCA-GF), working with  Prof. Stephen Gould. Before that, I was a Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (ACRV). My research interests lie on the intersection of 3D computer vision, machine learning and geometry.  In particular, I was working on applying deep learning methods to 3D point clouds (detection, classification and action recognition). On my quest to change the world, I created the Talking Papers Podcast, a podcast by researchers for researchers that aims to be a new medium for disseminating research and help early career academics.

I received my PhD in 2019 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology at the department of mechanical engineering in the laboratory for CAD and Lifecycle engineering. My PhD supervisors were Prof. Anath Fischer and Prof. Michael Lindenbaum. I received both my B.Sc (Cum Laude 2008) and M.Sc (Summa Cum Laude 2015) in mechanical engineering from the Technion.

Below I summarized my professional and teaching experience. Honours and awards can be found in this link. A list of my publications can be found at this link.

 

Academic Degrees

2019 PhD.  Mechanical Engineering Department, Technion Israel Institute of Technology

2015 M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering Department, Technion Israel Institute of Technology (Summa Cum Laude)

2008 B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering Department, Technion Israel Institute of Technology (Cum Laude)

Research Interests

  • Surface Reconstruction using Implicit Neural Representation.
  • Normal estimation for 3D point clouds.
  • 3D action understanding.
  • Deep Learning for 3D data.
  • Point cloud descriptors.
  • Over-segmentation of 3D point clouds.

Honours – Research

  • 2020 MSCA-IF-GF – Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual global fellowship
  • 2019  ISEF – (Israel Scholarship Education Foundation) International Fellowship
  • 2018  Best poster award at the Mechanical engineering research day, Technion
  • 2017   Scholarship for academic excellence, Jacobs award for doctoral students
  • 2016   Scholarship for academic excellence, Daniel Award for doctoral students
  • 2016   Mechanical engineering department scholarship for academic excellence (March – July)
  • 2015   Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (with thesis). Highest Excellency (Summa Cum Laude), Technion I.I.T
  • 2015    HP Indigo award for Academic Excellency
  • 2008   B.Sc. in mechanical engineering. Deans Excellency (Cum Laude),Technion I.I.T

Honours – Teaching

  • Consistent Honorary TA (five awards), CAD Systems 1 (Undergraduate course), Mechanical Engineering, Technion. (for semesters: s2017, s2016, w2016, s2015, w2015)
  • Honorary TA (three awards), CAD Systems 1 (Undergraduate course), Mechanical Engineering, Technion. (for semesters: s2013, s2014, w2014)

Teaching  Experience

2015 – 2019 Lecturer – CAD Systems 1, Mechanical Engineering Department, Technion I.I.T

2013 – 2019 TA – CAD Systems 1, Mechanical Engineering Department, Technion I.I.T

2008   TA – CAD Lab, undergraduate course, Mechanical Engineering Department, Technion I.I.T

2007 – 2008   Teaching Position, Asat (Technion Student Organization)

Professional Experience 

2024 – present: Senior Scientist at Roblox

2021 – 2023: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (MSCA-GF) at the Australian National Universit (ANU) and Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Project title: “3DinAction Understanding human action from unstructured 3D point clouds using deep learning methods”. Supervisor: Prof. Stephen Gould

2019-2020: Reserach Fellow at the Australian National Universit (ANU)  node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (ACRV). Project title: “Robots, Humans, and Actions”. Supervisor: Prof. Stephen Gould

2018 :  Research visit at Prof. Matthias Nießner‘s Visual Computing group, Technical University of Munich (TUM)

2014 – 2015:   Project advisor, Haifa Reali High School

2008 – 2012:   Mechanical Engineer, IDF

2008 – 2012:   Mentor, FIRST Robotics Competition (Ironi D High School Tel Aviv)

2007 – 2008:   Mechanical Designer, Sharon Designs, Tel Aviv

2006  summer: Intern – IAESTE program, Merseburg university, Germany

2005 – 2008:   Instructor, Perach Project (Big Brother)

Community Service

2022 – present  Founder – The Talking Papers Podcast [link]
2025 – Social Media Chair – Winter Conference on Applications in Computer Vision (WACV 2025) [link]

2022 – Website and Poster Chair – Robotic Vision Summer School 2022 [link]

2021 – Program Chair – Robotic Vision Summer School 2021 [link]

2020 – Organizer – ECCV tutorial on Deep Declarative Networks [link]

Reviewer for: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR. TPAMI ,CAD, Remote Sensing. 

Personal

I was born in 1985 in the city of Hadera, Israel. Everyone I know calls me Itzik (common Israeli nickname for Yizhak – see how to pronounce it ). I am married to the talented Anna and father to the adorable, Shaked and Keshet (boy and girl). We currently live in Foster City, California, USA (previously in Atlit, Israel, and before that Canberra Australia).

In my free time, I enjoy playing volleyball (formerly semi-professionally in Haifa team in Israel’s second league). I love teaching and every activity that combines it with technology (mentoring in FIRST Robotics Competition probably influenced me more than it did the kids). I like to think of myself as a “Maker” and I enjoy DIY projects that include mechanics, electronics, and programming.

Profiles on Professional Social Networks

*Note – these profiles are averagely maintained. The most current information is available here on my website and BlueSky / Twitter.