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MY JOURNEY

The most consequential stages of my career, in both academia and industry. For a more complete profile checkout linkedin.

Sept 2024 - Present

REALITY LABS

Currently, I am an Engineering Manager in the Reality Labs at Meta, Zürich. I work on mixed reality and extended reality technology and applications.

May 2024 - Aug 2024

MANIPULATION


VP PRODUCT

Dec 2023 - May 2024

As part of a brief stint at ANYbotics. I led the manipulation effort where I developed the 3-year strategic plan for technology and product. I also led staffing for the first hires for the manipulation team. Before which, I served as VP Product where I led the product management team and owned the portfolio strategy. As VP Product, I helped align the commercial and product strategies. I also assisted in laying the foundations for product  launch and solution segmentation strategies. I also doubled the PM team during my tenure.

Oct 2016 - Sept 2023

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER & CO-FOUNDER

What started as a casual chat after a game of pick-up soccer, ultimately ended up in a transformational collaboration. Stuart Maggs was introduced to me by my dear friend and soccer teammate James Askew. In 2015, Stuart & I co-founded Naska.AI with a mission to modernize 21st-century construction. We officially closed Naska.AI in the summer of 2023. Now our technology and products live on in the amazing portfolio of FieldAI. Check out their website for more details.

June 2012 - May 2018

DOCTORAL RESEARCHER

I spent a wonderful 6 years in sunny Southern California working at the (now defunct) Computational Learning and Motor Control Laboratory at the University of Southern California. During this period I was also a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. I also received a Masters' in Computer Science focused on mathematical optimization from USC. My doctoral research primarily focused on algorithms for active and interactive perception for 3D object recognition. You can read my dissertation here.

May 2016 - Aug 2016

ROBOTICS RESEARCHER

I was a part of the computer vision team at Qualcomm Research in San Diego. I worked on algorithms for loop closure detection for visual-inertial navigation. My hosts were Dr. Chris Brunner and Dr. Harris Teague.

May 2015 - Aug 2015

COMPUTER VISION RESEARCHER

At the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Boston, I worked with the computer vision team on Illumination Invariant Image Matching for Autonomous Driving Applications. My hosts were (Prof.) Dr. Srikumar Ramalingam and Dr. Yuichi Taguchi.

Sept 2009 - June 2015

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

At the University of Pennsylvania, I received my second masters (Robotics). I did research on computer vision and active perception at the world-renowned GRASP Laboratory under the guidance of  Prof. Kostas Daniilidis and Prof. Camillo J. Taylor. My thesis title "Sequential Hypothesis Testing for Next Best View Estimation" was supervised by, Prof. Kostas Daniilidis who was also my primary advisor. You can find a copy of my masters' thesis here.

May 2011 - Sept 2011

ROBOTICS RESEARCHER

I spent a summer at the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, working on failure recovery for autonomous mobile robots and humanoids using shared autonomy interfaces. I was hosted by Dr. Benjamin Pitzer and Dr. Sarah Osentoski.

May 2010 - Sept 2010

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

I worked on Riverine Mapping Project under the advisement of Prof Sanjiv Singh at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My primary research objective was to detect rivers in monocular color images to enable navigation for UAVs in GPS denied riverine environments. During this period I collaborated with Dr. Stephen Nuske and Dr. Sebastian Scherer.

Aug 2007 - May 2008

RESEARCHER

I received my first masters in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park where I worked on Space Robotics and Interplanetary Guidance and Navigation. I also had the pleasure of working at Space Systems Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. David Akin.

ALUMNI

Over the years I have had the opportunity to work with some wonderful student interns at Naska.AI, some of whose theses I have advised. My former students and their projects are listed below. If you want to do an internship or a thesis project with me, have a look at the projects I am currently offering

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JOAQUIM ORTIZ DE HARO

Post Doctoral Scholar at NYU

Internship (2017)
Project: Geometric Alignment for Large Scaled Rigid 3D Structures

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MARÍA ISABEL ARTIGAS

PhD student at KU Leuven

Internship (2017)
Project: Robust Arm Pose Estimation for Visual Servoing

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ALEJANDRO MORA

Robotics Engineer at Unmanned Life

Masters Thesis (2019)
Project: Robust 3D IMU-LIDAR Calibration and
Multi Sensor Probabilistic State
Estimation

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MARIA VILA ABAD

Software Engineer at StreamSets

Masters Thesis (2020)
Project: Instance Segmentation Annotation on Construction
Site Images

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MONICA PÉREZ SERRANO

Robotics Engineer at Sevensense Robotics

Internship (2020)
Project: Trajectory Optimization for Remote Assisted Teleoperation

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ELOI BOVÉ

3D Software Engineer at T-Systems

Masters Thesis (2021)
Project: Multimodal Semantic SLAM for Lidar Visual Inertial Systems

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NAVID KAYHANI, PH.D.

Machine Learning Engineer at FieldAI

Internship (2022)
Project: BIM-based construction quality assessment with Graph Neural Networks.

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