Julien Mairal, a former PhD student of J. Ponce and F. Bach won several prizes for his PhD thesis about "Sparse coding for machine learning, image processing and computer vision". See details in section  9.1 .

Jean Ponce was awarded an Advanced ERC Grant, starting Jan 2011.

Andrew Zisserman was awarded the Rank Prize for his “Outstanding contributions to modern computer vision" http://www.rankprize.org/ .

I. Laptev, J. Ponce and J. Sivic (together with C. Schmid (INRIA Grenoble)) co-organized one week summer school on visual recognition and machine learning at Ecole Normale Superieure http://www.di.ens.fr/willow/events/cvml2011/ . The school has attracted 175 participants from 28 countries.

The updated 2nd edition of the textbook “Computer Vision: A Modern Approach" by David Forsyth and Jean Ponce has been published by Pearson Education in November 2011.

The group has split into two on January 1st 2011 to create a new INRIA project-team called SIERRA. The new group and its interactions with WILLOW is described in section  6.5 .