About Me

I am CTO at Verdant Robotics, a Bay Area startup that is creating the most advanced multi-action robotic farming implement, designed for superhuman farming!

I am still affiliated with the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I am a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, but I am currently on leave and will not take any new students in 2023.

I joined Georgia Tech in 2001 after obtaining a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, where I worked with Hans Moravec, Chuck Thorpe, Sebastian Thrun, and Steve Seitz. Before that, I also obtained degrees from Case Western Reserve University and The Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium.

In 2015-2016 I served as Chief Scientist at Skydio, a startup founded by MIT grads to create intuitive interfaces for micro-aerial vehicles. In 2016-2018, I served as Technical Project Lead at Facebook’s “Building 8” hardware division within Facebook Reality Labs. Finally, I was a part-time Research Scientist at Google AI from 2020-2022, before I joined Verdant Robotics.

My research is in the overlap between robotics and computer vision, and I am particularly interested in graphical model techniques to solve large-scale problems in mapping, 3D reconstruction, and increasingly model-predictive control. The GTSAM toolbox embodies many of the ideas his research group has worked on in the past few years and is available at gtsam.org and the GTSAM Github repo.

Note: this site is still a bit sparse as I am moving from my former iWeb-generated website to Github Pages.