Dr. David Paz Ruiz

Now at BOSCH Corporate Research

Dr. David Paz Ruiz, a founding member of the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory (AVL), obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. While pursuing his B.S. in Computer Engineering and M.S. in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control at UC San Diego, he contributed to various research projects, including sensor development, hardware accelerators, high-performance computing, and autonomous vehicles. Throughout his doctoral studies, Dr. Paz worked at AVL under the guidance of Dr. Henrik I. Christensen. His research focused on road user trajectory prediction, intent recognition, and dynamic scene understanding, with a particular emphasis on overcoming scalability constraints in existing architectures. At AVL, Paz played a key role in the development of mapping, localization, planning, and control strategies for UCSD’s autonomous mail delivery vehicles. Leading the team, he collaborated closely with AVL members to assess overall autonomous vehicle performance and robust perception and simulation strategies. After completing his doctoral degree, Dr. David Paz Ruiz transitioned to Bosch Corporate Research, where he explores perception and machine learning, contributing his expertise to further advancements in these fields.

• dpazruiz@ucsd.edu | avl.ucsd.edu/dfpazr/

Pojung Lai

Now at Qualcomm

Po-Jung Lai received his masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering focusing on Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control. He worked on benchmarking the performance of Autonomous Vehicles at the Contextual Robotics Institute. Before he joined Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory in the Contextual Robotics Institute, he worked in WeMo Scooter as Embedded System Engineer. He holds both B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and B.S. in Finance Management from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

Sumukha Harish

Now at Lucid Motors

Sumukha Harish comes from a Mechanical Engineering background and specialized in Control and Robotics at UCSD. He has worked on Control, Sensor Fusion, and Route Planning. Working for AVL helped him get a first-hand experience in the fields of his interest. He loves to diversify in expertise and AVL has been a great place to do that, delving himself into problems and working alongside people in different domains. The result of which, he has seen himself grow, in gaining experience and making amazing friends!

Nathan Chan

Now at Qualcomm

Nathan Chan completed an M.S. in Computer Science at UCSD. At AVL, he contributed to the autonomous mail delivery project and campus-wide HD map definitions.

Shawn Winston

Now at Qualcomm

Shawn received his MS in Computer Science with a focus on robotics from UCSD in the spring of 2019. Prior to this, he received his BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Shawn helped work on the global path planner for AVL and hopes to apply the skills he learned from the lab and his degree to the autonomous vehicle industry.

Yuqing Jiang

Now at Facebook

Yuqing Jiang was a master’s student in Computer Science at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. Her work at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory involved data analytics and benchmarking for the mail delivery project.

Qinru Li

Now at Waymo

Qinru Li was a graduate student in the Artificial Intelligence track at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He contributed to several research projects related to the development of quadruped robots, image-guided medical surgery, and autonomous vehicles. His research focus at AVL involved the enhancement of semantic scene understanding.

Hao Xiang

Now at UCLA (PhD student)

Hao Xiang majored in Machine Learning and Data Science at UC San Diego. During his undergraduate study at Fudan University, he contributed to many machine learning-based projects involving Stereo Matching, HD Map generation, Reinforcement Learning, Few-Shot learning. At AVL, he contributed to sensor fusion to fuse information from various sensors to get more robust feature representations and semantic mapping. His research interests include Perception, Sensor fusion, Reinforcement Learning, SLAM, Optimization. Xiang is now pursuing a PhD at UCLA.

Yunhai Han

Now at Georgia Tech (PhD student)

Yunhai Han was a graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. He earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Yanshan University in China. He took part in a number of competitions, including China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling, National Undergraduate Electronics Design Contest and RoboMaster. He learned about both hardware and software of robotics from these experiences. At AVL, Han contributed to the design and development of an auto-calibration method for autonomous vehicles when a traditional chessboard calibration is not available. He has a keen interest in robotics and hopes to make some contributions to this great community.

Yuhan Liu

Now at Rutgers (PhD student)

Yuhan Liu was a master’s student in Computer Science at UC San Diego. While pursuing his B.S. in Electronic Information Engineering at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, he contributed to computer vision research projects involving precipitation forecasting based on radar reflectivity images and pedestrian feature recognition from surveillance videos. At AVL, Liu contributed to the design and development of an auto-calibration method for autonomous vehicles when a traditional chessboard calibration is not available.

Dominique Meyer, PhD

LiMAR AI Inc, Founder & CEO

Dominique Meyer received his B.S. in Physics at the University of California San Diego in 2017 and earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering working with Professor Kuester and Christensen. He was part of the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative and the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, focusing on the development of imaging systems for autonomous ground and aerial vehicles. As National Geographic Young Explorer, he has led numerous expeditions to digitally document at risk cultural heritage sites around the world and is continuously passionate at applying vision systems for large scale mapping.

Srinidhi Srinivas

Now at Autodesk Research

Srinidhi was a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department majoring in Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Control. He earned his Bachelor’s in Telecommunication engineering from PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore where his thesis was Brain Computer Interface for Game Control. He worked at Analog Devices Inc. as a Senior Software Engineer for 3 years in the Automotive Infotainment division developing software frameworks for next generation infotainment platforms. At AVL his research involved road network estimation and dynamic scene modeling. He is interested about the prospects of intersection of robotics and AI.

Parth Doshi

Now at Cruise

Parth was a CSE MS student at UCSD. His previous experience includes internships in the autonomous vehicles, robotics, and video processing domains. His work at AVL involved motion forecasting and prediction for multiple agents on the road.

Parthasarathi Kumar

Now at AMD

Parthasarathi Kumar completed master’s degree in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UCSD. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronics engineering from BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad and then worked as a software developer at MathWorks. He worked on the auto-labeling project at AVL. Now he is at AMD.

Varun Vupparige

Now at Nexteer Automotive

Varun Vupparige completed his master’s degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering specializing in Dynamics and Controls at UC San Diego. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the RV College of Engineering. He worked as a Mechatronics Engineer at Noccarc Robotics, an early stage startup which built ICU Ventilators during COVID pandemic. He worked on dynamic motion planning for autonomous micro-mobility vehicles under the supervision of David Paz and Professor Henrik I. Christensen. He is passionate about impactful technologies which can better common people’s lives. He is now at Nexteer Automotive.

Kai Chuen Tan

Now at Genista Biosciences

Kai Chuen Tan completed M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering student with a specialization in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control at the University of California, San Diego. He worked on dynamic motion planning for autonomous micro-mobility vehicles as a Graduate Research Assistant at the UCSD Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory under the supervision of David Paz and Professor Henrik I. Christensen. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with Summa Cum Laude from the Ohio State University and earned an Honor Research Distinction in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. He is now at Genista Biosciences. To learn more about his work, please visit https://www.kaichuentan.ml/

• kctan@ucsd.edu | https://www.kaichuentan.ml/

Siddharth Dey

Siddharth Dey was a Master’s student in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control at the ECE Department of UCSD. He received his bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM). He has an interest in applying deep learning models for self-driving cars.

Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha

Now at Qualcomm

Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha is a Computer Science MS. student with a strong interest in autonomous systems and deep learning. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Intelligent Systems from Manipal Institute of Technology. He has experience working with various programming languages and libraries such as C++, C, Python, ROS, PyTorch, Tensorflow and has published a paper in INTERSPEECH 2020. He has worked on various projects related to 3D object detection, cross-modality registration, and has gained experience in autonomous vehicle research and open source contributions. Currently, he is working as a research assistant at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory at UCSD, where he is benchmarking 3D Object Detection models on Waymo and Argoverse2 datasets and setting up testing infrastructure on CARLA simulations. His future aims include continuing to work on cutting-edge research in the field of autonomous systems and deep learning.

Hitvarth Diwanji

Now at Matic Robotics

Hitvarth Diwanji is a Master’s student in Computer Science at UC San Diego. He earned his bachelor’s degree (with Honors) in Mechanical Engineering with Dual Minors in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB). Prior to joining the lab, he worked on Computer Vision, Motion Planning, and Decision-Making aspects of a self-driving car at Team SeDriCa, a student-led team developing level-4 autonomy in India. Currently, Hitvarth is working on improving the performance of 3D object detection methods on Livox lidar data. He also works on incorporating the strengths of visual language models in the autonomous driving pipeline.

Andrew Liang

Jessica Zhong

Andres Gutierrez