Symmetry, Optimality, and Robotics

I’m a research engineer at Matic, where I work on problems relating to optimization and visual SLAM. At the same time, I’m finishing my master’s thesis on representation learning for reinforcement learning at the University of Maryland, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Professor Kaiqin Zhang. I’m curious about symmetry and optimization, and I try to use these tools to make robots smarter.

Projects

Aside from my job, my recent work has been in discovering and exploiting symmetries in deep learning models. Right now I have one paper under review and another in progress regarding this topic. While the code for these papers isn’t out yet, I’ve open sourced some related libraries, including torchemlp, geonets, and camoc.

A while back, I started blair3sat, an academic team designing a CubeSat to measure ionospheric charge density. The project fizzled out in 2021, but recently I’ve been helping some students start it back up again.

Work Experience

• Matic, Research Engineer, [Jun 2023 - Present)
• Nuro, Radar DSP Intern, [Jun 2020 - Dec 2020] ∪ [Jun 2021 - Aug 2021]
• Intelligent Automation, Intern, [Jun 2019 - Aug 2019]
• Naval Research Laboratory, Intern, [Jun 2017 - Aug 2017] ∪ [May 2018 - Aug 2018]

Educational Background

• BS, Mathematics, University of Maryland, [Aug 2019 - May 2022]
• BS, Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, [Aug 2019 - May 2022] ∪ δ(May 2023)
• MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, [Aug 2022 - May 2023] ∪ (Returning Jan 2024)