Silvio Savarese

Silvio Savarese is an Italian-American computer scientist focused on artificial intelligence, computer vision, and social robotics. He is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, and executive vice president and chief scientist at Salesforce. and in 2026, he was appointed to the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.

Early life and education Savarese earned his degree from the University of Naples Federico II in Naples, Italy. He subsequently received his PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2005.

Savarese and his father, Gey, developed the computer adventure game A Quiet Weekend in Capri. The game was released in Italy in May 2003 and in North America in 2004. The pair also developed a sequel, AnaCapri: The Dream, released in 2007.

Career From 2005 to 2008, Savarese was a postdoctoral fellow at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 2008 to 2013, first as assistant professor and then associate professor, where he directed the Computer Vision Group and conducted research in 3D scene interpretation, robotics, and machine learning. In 2011, he received an NSF CAREER Award for research into machine interpretation of 3D scenes.

He then became a tenured professor of computer science at Stanford University, where his research topics included computer vision, machine learning, and robotic perception.

Salesforce In 2021, Savarese joined Salesforce as chief scientist. His initial work was in leading development of Einstein GPT, and he now leads development for agentic AI platforms. and Agentforce, an artificial intelligence agent platform for enterprise use.

Personal life He is married to computer scientist, AI researcher, and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li. They have two children.