The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has elected Marios Savvides from Carnegie Mellon University to its 2025 cohort of fellows for his work in applied AI, computer vision, and biometric security.
The NAI Fellows Program was established to highlight academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors.
Savvides is the founder and director of the Center for Foundational Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University, where he holds the endowed Professorship of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Over the past two decades, his lab has produced one of the most influential bodies of work in applied AI, spanning unconstrained face recognition, long-range iris capture, general object detection, multimodal fusion, and next-generation perception systems. His team’s pioneering achievement in long-range iris imaging, capable of reliable acquisition at distances up to 12 meters, redefined what the field believed was technically possible.
