Manolis Savva
Princeton University, Simon Fraser University, Stanford University
Papers
14
Total Citations
1,382
H-Index
11
About
Manolis Savva is a prominent researcher at the intersection of 3D scene understanding, embodied artificial intelligence, and photorealistic simulation. His work has fundamentally advanced how AI agents perceive, navigate, and interact with indoor environments. Among his most influential contributions is the Replica Dataset (2019, 384 citations), which introduced 18 highly photo-realistic 3D indoor scene reconstructions complete with semantic annotations, setting a new benchmark for indoor scene research. Equally transformative is his work on Habitat (2019, 197 citations), a high-performance simulation platform for embodied AI that has become a cornerstone tool for training virtual robots in photorealistic environments — further extended through Habitat 2.0 to support complex physics-enabled rearrangement tasks. His development of DD-PPO (171 citations) demonstrated near-perfect PointGoal navigation through massively distributed reinforcement learning across 2.5 billion frames. Savva has also contributed to physically-based rendering for scene understanding, text-driven 3D scene generation, and crowd navigation using relational graph learning. With hundreds of citations across multiple high-impact papers, his research has shaped modern embodied AI, making him an essential figure for anyone studying intelligent agent perception and simulation.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces384 citations · 2019
- 2
- 3Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research197 citations · 2019
- 4DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion\n Frames171 citations · 2019
- 5Relational Graph Learning for Crowd Navigation146 citations · 2020
- 6Text to 3D Scene Generation with Rich Lexical Grounding62 citations · 2015
- 7
- 8Text to 3D Scene Generation with Rich Lexical Grounding33 citations · 2015
- 9Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat25 citations · 2021
- 10Decentralized Distributed PPO: Solving PointGoal Navigation15 citations · 2019