I’m currently an engineer a company called Simbe Robotics where over the last three years I’ve played a leading role in computer vision and machine learning initiatives. Specifically I’ve spent a lot of time building object detection and OCR systems on home grown and curated datasets. I’ve also played an instrumental role in putting the computer vision models and pipeline in production and scaling it to match the needs of our growing customer base. Outside of engineering work I also mentor my colleagues both in how to become better software engineers as well as how to balance the various aspects of work.

My history has been a bit meandering. At a young age I was very interested in chemistry, from there it went

  • Medicine (8th grade or so)
  • Computer animation and effects (12th grade)
  • 3 year hiatus working at a TV station
  • Bachelors started in mass communications (with second major option of Nuclear Engineering to shut up my family)
  • Dropped media studies in favor of a double major in Nuclear and Mechanical engineering
  • Learned to make video games in C++ on the side
  • First internship at Penn State in nuclear fuel loading design, exposure to python
  • Side job on campus working researching thermal design of nuclear reactor cores, job goals set
  • Mechatronics course during last semester, made easter egg pattern machine, job goals derailed…
  • Abandoned nuclear engineering and heat transfer all together
  • Joined Penn State lab as masters student working on battery systems (wut?)
  • Realized batteries are boring, do a really bad (and incorrect) masters thesis, switch advisors
  • Control theory -> estimtaion theory -> robotic perception -> robots
  • Honed C++ and python while doing point cloud processing work
  • Got internship at Simbe while fed up of PhD
  • Work at Simbe starting in robot perception (sensor filtering, object detection)
  • Perception -> hardware integration and testing -> classical computer vision -> deep learning

And that’s more or less where I am (+ I have a youtube channel now about text editors, programming, and machine learning).