Chewie is a dog owned by Antonia but is seen as an office dog and mascot inside of the BUW-KI. They could also implement him in the CARLA simulator as the Puppeteers have designed a model of him which has been labelled and is in the editor of the simulator but has not been put in any map yet.

Born in 2016, Chewie quickly graduated from dog training with excellent marks in non barking and friendliness. He enrolled at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, where, only at the age of 4, artificial intelligence (AI) became his favorite subject of study. Since then, he became an almost daily visitor of the Interdisciplinary Center of Machine Learning and Data Analytics (IZMD), joining the U Wuppertal BUW-KI lab.
His research interest is focused on the question, how deep neural networks can recognize semantic categories that they have never seen during training. Not only that, in semantic segmentation Chewie also was interested how to localize such out of distribution objects on high resolution images, which led him to co-create the CV task of OoD segmentation that thereafter became an active field of international research.
Chewie quickly realized that progress this direction was hindered by lack of adequate data. With highest personal commitment, he therefore conducted a program of production and annotation of real world, high resolution data sets with OoD objects immersed. This activity resulted in a first set of papers including a NeurIPS and an ICCV publication that quickly arose interest of the international computer vision community.


While real world data still is the gold standard for ensuring safety of AI-based perception in automated driving, Chewie quickly realized that despite all effort one will never arrive at producing the necessary amount of data required for a comprehensive safety argument in automated driving. Consequently, he decided that going synthetic is an inevitable next step. To this aim, he successfully collaborated with the puppeteers design studio and crated himself a second, digital identity.

To pursue his studies, Chewie enrolled to the prestigious VUC (Virtual University of Carla), where he became the first dog researcher in the history of this institution. He quickly released further data sets at VCU while still holding half of a position at IZMD, Wuppertal. This productive period lead to a further publication.



While VUC and IZMD remain the home base for his research, Chewie also integrated himself in international projects with researchers from the University of Zagreb, where he participated in a paper on counterfactual OoD examples.


In 2022, only at the age of 6, Chewie is already looking back on a successful scientific career. Together with co-authors, he participated in no less than 6 papers with 43 citations in total, which brings his h-index to 7. Chewie is widely considered as one of the 10 most influential dogs in computer vision and is co-founder and honorable member of the ADCV, the association of dogs in Computer Vision.