creators

Ross Girshick - R-CNN inventor, researcher at Anthropic

Ross Girshick invented R-CNN and wrote Detectron. After Microsoft Research, FAIR, AI2 and Vercept, he joined Anthropic in the February 2026 acquisition.

Ross Girshick is a computer vision researcher known for inventing R-CNN, the region-based convolutional network approach that reshaped object detection with deep learning from 2013 onwards, and for writing Detectron, the open-source object-detection platform. He took his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2012 under Pedro Felzenszwalb, defending in April of that year, and was a postdoctoral fellow in EECS at UC Berkeley from September 2012 to August 2014, mentored by Jitendra Malik. By his own account he spent ten years as a research scientist in industry and non-profit labs: Microsoft Research from 2014 to 2015, FAIR at Facebook and then Meta from 2015 to 2023, and the Allen Institute for AI from 2023 to 2024. In late 2024 he co-founded Vercept, a Seattle computer-use startup that grew out of the AI2 incubator. Anthropic announced on 25 February 2026 that it had acquired Vercept and that the team, including co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs and Girshick, would join it to work on Claude's computer use. His awards include the PAMI Young Researcher Award (2017), the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize three times (2017, 2021, 2023), and three ten-year test-of-time awards: the 2024 Longuet-Higgins Prize for R-CNN, the 2025 Helmholtz Prize for Fast R-CNN and the NeurIPS 2025 Test of Time Award for Faster R-CNN.

Specialization

computer vision, object detection, computer-use agents

Country

United States