Education

Stanford University, Sep '16 - Jun '18
 Master of Science in Computer Science
  GPA 3.90
Rice University, Aug '12 - May '16
 Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering
  GPA 3.90, Cum Laude, Distinction in Research and Creative Work

Professional Experience

XMotors.ai, Santa Clara, CA
Senior Behavior Planning Engineer, Jul '23 - Present
  • Design and implement state-of-art behavior planning and motion planning algorithms for autonomous driving system, including urban-driving, highway-driving, and driving in unstructured areas
  • Design and implement behavior planning algorithms and data structures foundational to the autonomy stack, specifically developing the traffic light module under standard-definition map
  • Work closely with other teams to research and identify improvements for compute platforms, middleware libraries, and infrastructure pipelines, including provide prompt bug fixes and interface upgrades
  • Conduct major system development, design, and testing as a leading engineer in the team, in order to analyze and/or improve current business logic and algorithms
Dexterity Inc., Redwood City, CA
Robotics Engineer, May '18 - Jul '23
  • Design, develop frameworks and optimize algorithms for robot control and motion planning in C++
  • Implement trajectory tracking methods in C++ for fast, accurate, and smooth robot motion, full stack from velocity profiling to driver control
  • Implement collision checking/avoidance methods in C++ to ensure safe robot movements
  • Develop toolchains for robot simulation with physics engine, as a substitution of ROS
  • Integrate perception models, control stack, and peripheral sensor modules to build robot applications
  • Design workflow and business logic of a line-kitting application, implemented in Python and deployed onsite for a major client
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Research Assistant, Stanford Vision Lab, Dec '16 - Jun '18
  • Set up robotics perception and learning infrastructure, including future Stanford Arm Farm
  • Deployed virtual reality interface for scaling up task demonstration data collection
  • Conducting research on imitation learning and RL under context of robotics
  • Conducting research on robotics sim-to-real transfer learning problem
Course Assistant, Stanford CS 231A: Intro to Computer Vision, Jan '18 - Apr '18
  • Hold 2-hour session every week, grade homework, make exams and lecture review sessions.
Cyberneticcloud Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Software Developer Intern, May '17 - Sept '17
  • Implemented cloud service usage prediction model with deeplearning4j
Crossfit China,
Olympic Weightlifting Specialist, Personal Trainer Group, Jun '16 - Aug '16
  • Olymipc lifting training sessions--snatch, clean and jerk
Rice University, Houston, TX
Research Assistant, Rice Efficient Computing Group, May '15 - July '16
  • Built image-classification energy reduction simulation framework RedEye based on Caffe
  • Extended GoogLeNet Deep Convolutional Network with noise layer and energy cost layer
  • Trained ImageNet data on modified Caffe framework for optimal noise-energy trade-off
  • Designed RedEye chip memory layout on Cadence
Research Assistant, Rice Scalable Health Initative, June '14 - Oct '14
  • Developed stride/motion detector that recognizes, analyzes motion and generates feedback
  • Integrated multiple accelerometers, pressure sensors, and SD cards on MSP430F6726
  • Conducted Bluetooth-based real-time data processing in MATLAB
  • Conducted DSP on gathered sensor data, including feature extraction/model matching
  • Designed, tested, and revised motion recognition algorithms based on gathered sensor data
Teaching Assistant, Rice University Electrical Engineering Dept. and Math Dept., '13 - '15

Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, Multivariable Calculus, Single Variable Calculus

  • Graded homework and evaluated students’ performance
  • Held TA sessions 3-4 hours every week to answer students’ questions
AKAD Education, Ningbo, China
Consultant, Mar '12 - Aug '12
  • Taught two classes of high school students 3-hour lessons on SAT reading weekly
  • Provided personal consultation for five students on college pitching, essay writing, and application logistics
  • Benchmarked services with other educational consulting companies and reported possible improvements

Selected Projects

Cloud-Crowdsourcing Robotics, Mar '17 - Jun '18
  • Developed keyboard, VR, phone interface for teleoperating robot in simulation
  • Devised and designed setup for daily tasks that are scalable for crowdsourcing
  • Implemented task demonstration environment in simulation with Bullet Physics
New York City Taxi Pick-up Strategy Generation, Dec '16
  • Performed data mining on 1.1 billion taxi records by AWS EMR cloud computing
  • Used PySpark for massive data processing and information extraction
  • Implemented MDP value iteration to generate optimal passenger pick-up policies
  • Visualized data and simulation paths with tools such as gmplot
RGB Image Depth Certainty Estimation, Dec '16
  • Attached dropout layers on RGB-depth Convolutional Neural Network during test phase
  • Generate qualitative and quantitative analysis on predicted depth maps
Wireless Neural Recorder (Senior Design), Apr '16
  • Designed and built a high-throughput, low-power wireless alternative to current Electrocochleography (ECoG) technologies. The system includes 16 neural electrodes that collects the signal, an analog front-end Intan RHD2132 that samples the signal, a micro-processor Nordic NRF52 that compresses and sends data, and a secure server that displays received data in real-time
Online Chat Application, Dec '15
  • Designed Use Case Diagram and system block diagram for API construction
  • Used Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) for data package exchange
  • Applied multiple layers of MVC to encapsulate chat rooms that support text and file transmission
Document Database Query System, Dec '14
  • Parsed a set of documents into a vector-based corpus database for Gibbs sampling
  • Implemented an M-Tree to store parsed documents
  • Implemented the query system that compares input document with the corpus and displays top K most similar documents
Photosensitive Robot Car, Mar '14
  • Assembled motor driver SN754410 and luminosity/ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection
  • Designed and installed PCB with amplifiers, voltage regulators, and sensors
  • Implemented PWM for motor control and used I2C protocol for ADC module
  • Integrated NeoPixel LEDs and micro-speaker for barrier-range display and alarm

Publications

RoboTurk: A Crowdsourced Platform
for Robotic Skill Learning through Imitation
, CORL 2018
Ajay Mandlekar, Yuke Zhu, Animesh Garg, Jonathan Booher, Max Spero, Albert Tung, Julian Gao, John Emmons, Anchit Gupta, Emre Orbay, Li Fei-Fei, Silvio Savarese
Neural Task Programming:
Learning to Generalize Across Hierarchical Tasks
, ICRA 2018
 Danfei Xu, Suraj Nair, Yuke Zhu, Julian Gao, Animesh Garg, Li Fei-Fei, Silvio Savarese
RedEye: Analog ConvNet Image Sensor Architecture
for Continuous Mobile Vision
, ISCA 2016
 Robert LiKamWa, Yunhui Hou, Julian Gao, Mia Polansky, Lin Zhong

Patents

Robotic Multi-Item Type Palletizing & Depalletizing, US_10,549,928_V1, Feb. 4, 20'
Robotic Handling of Soft Products in Non-Rigid Packaging, No. 16/797,359, In-Process, Feb. 21, 20'
Robotic Carriage Tray Table, No. 17/960,544, In-Process, Oct. 5, 22'
Emulated Robot Peripherals, No. 63/435,176, In-Process, Dec. 23, 22'
Multiple Robot Simultaneous and Synchronous Pick and Place, No. 18/393,504, In-Process, Dec. 21, 23'

Selected Honors

  • IEEE Eta Kappa Nu Rice Chapter (IEEE-HKN)
    The honor society of IEEE dedicated to recognizing individual excellence
  • Louis J. Walsh Scholarship in Engineering
    $1,500 scholarship for deserving engineering students at Rice University
  • President’s Honor Roll
    Recognition of undergraduate outstanding academic achievement
  • Distinction in Research and Creative Work
    Awarded to at most 10% of graduating seniors
  • Bill Wilson Best Senior Design Award
    $250 prize for Rice University Affiliates Day senior design showcase