Savvides named National Academy of Inventors Fellow

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.

Savvides’ research has translated into real-world systems at national and commercial scale. His patented models and algorithms power critical security and infrastructure deployments across federal agencies and major transportation hubs, supporting high-throughput, high-reliability biometric operations. In the private sector, his AI research has enabled perception systems for autonomous retail robotics, contributed to the redesign of inventory-analysis platforms, supported computer-vision products deployed across millions of consumer devices, and now underpins emerging retail AI systems being commercialized by UltronAI. His work and collaborations span defense, retail, transportation, robotics, and next-generation imaging, reflecting a broad and enduring impact across mission-critical domains.

Savvides has filed more than 80 patent applications, with over 30 already granted, and has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications. His Google Scholar h-index places him among the world’s leading researchers in computer vision and applied machine learning. A comprehensive overview of his publications, patents, and ongoing research programs is available at mariossavvides.com.

This year’s elected cohort includes 169 U.S. Fellows representing 127 universities, government agencies, and research institutions across 40 U.S. states. The 2025 Class of Fellows will be honored and presented their medals by a senior official of the United States Patent and Trademark Office at the NAI 15th Annual Conference on June 4th, 2026, in Los Angeles, California.