Dariu M. Gavrila received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1996. He was a visiting researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory in 1996. Since 1997, he has been a Senior Research Scientist at Daimler R&D in Ulm, Germany. In 2003, he was further named professor at the University of Amsterdam, chairing the area of Intelligent Perception Systems (part time).

Over the last decade, Prof. Gavrila has focused on visual systems for detecting humans and their activity, with application to intelligent vehicles and surveillance. His contributions are frequently cited, and he received the I/O 2007 Award from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).