About Me

Summary

  • In June 2020 I graduated from UWaterloo’s CS Co-op program, with an academic and extracurricular focus on robotics and automation.
  • I am graduating from my MASc from UWaterloo in Fall 2022, under the supervision of Derek Rayside.
  • My research is focussed on motion planning software with an application to automated driving. Research topics include mapping & environment modeling, action classification from video steams, and trajectory planning & control. See my Google Scholar profile for details.

Please look through this page to get an idea of what I’ve done, and where I’m heading!

Education

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Bachelor of Computer Science

University of Waterloo - September 2015 - May 2020

  • Achieved a 88% Cumulative Average and 90% Major Average

  • Completed 6/6 co-op placements, earning 5 Outstanding and 1 Excellent work term evaluations

Selected Courses
- MTE544 Autonomous Mobile Robots
- CS486 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
- CS480 Introduction to Machine Learning
- CS456 Computer Networks
- CS458 Computer Security and Privacy

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Masters of Applied Sciences

University of Waterloo - September 2020 - December 2022

  • 95% course work average

  • Alexander Graham Bell Scholarship awardee

  • ICRA 2022 Author & Presenter

Selected Courses
- SYDE655 Optimal Control
- ECE780 Model Predictive Control
- CS646 Computational Vision
- CS763 Computational Geometry
- CS885 Reinforcement Learning

Publications

DRG: A dynamic relation graph for unified prior-online environment modeling in urban autonomous driving

  • Status: Presented (ICRA 2022)
  • Co-authors: Mohammad Al-Sharman, Yeshu Jain, Jeffery Li, Derek Rayside, William Melek

Self-Learned Autonomous Driving at Unsignalized Intersections: A Hierarchical Reinforced Learning Approach for Feasible Decision-Making

  • Status: Submitted (IEEE T-ITS)
  • Co-authors: Mohammad Al-Sharman, Mohamed A Daoud, Mahmoud Nasr, Derek Rayside, William Melek

Real-time unified trajectory planning and optimal control for urban autonomous driving under static and dynamic obstacle constraints

  • Status: Submitted (ICRA 2023)
  • Co-authors: Mohammad Al-Sharman, Derek Rayside, William Melek

RADACS: Towards Higher-Order Reasoning using Action Recognition in Autonomous Vehicles

  • Status: Submitted (ICRA 2023)
  • Co-authors: Alex Zhuang, Eddy Zhou, Quanquan Li, Alikasim Budhwani, Mohammad Al-Sharman, Derek Rayside, William Melek

Industry Experience

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Matician

Research Engineer - September 2021 - December 2021

Research in self-supervised learning (SSL) for scene reconstruction via dense stereo in mapping applications. Introduced visual odometry to the SSL pipeline, allowing for photometric loss computations across time, increasing reconstruction accuracy.

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Facebook

Software Engineer - January 2019 - April 2019

Built new features for an internal tool which identifies anomalies in timeseries data and notifies subscribers. Implemented a new entry point for creating anomaly detectors, introducing thousands of new users to the tool.

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Zynga

Software Engineer (Analytics) - May 2018 - August 2018

Developed services that allow game teams to segment their players based on custom attributes, and assign those player segments to different variants of experiments.

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Sony Creative Software

Software Engineer - September 2017 - December 2017

Worked as part of a small scrum team, prototyping and presenting educational software to stakeholders.

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Kik Interactive

Android Developer - January 2017 - April 2017

Implemented features including GIF favoriting and message timestamps using Java and Object Oriented design.

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TribalScale

Software Engineer - May 2016 - August 2016

Developed the podcast section of the ABC News Android App using the OkHttp networking client and SQLite.

Supervisory Experience

Teaching Assistantships

In Winter 2021 I was the TA for ECE406 (Algorithm Design and Analysis). I was responsible for tutoring and marking the assignments of 150 ECE undergrad students.

UWaterloo Co-op Management

Since September 2019, I have consistently hired and managed co-op students on behalf of WATonomous, achieving an employer rating of 8.3 / 10. To date, we have supported 14 full-time co-ops, who have worked on projects ranging from guided soft target fabrication to action classification in video streams.

Summer 2022 Cohort

Alexander and Eddy: Action Classification

Bao: Mapping and Localization

Julian: Guided Soft Target Fabrication

Winter 2021 Cohort

Andrew: Mapping and Localization

Tae: Simulation Map Creation

Winter 2020 Cohort

Frank: Power Systems and Radar Driver

Spring 2019 Cohort

Tony: Path Planning

Wen: Sensor Calibration

Mitchell: Power Systems

Fall 2019 Cohort

Rowan: Project Management

Chad: Sensor Mounting

Vinayak: Dynamic Reconfigure