M. Usman Rafique

About Usman

I am a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with a demonstrated history of applying cutting-edge research to real-world problems. I currently work at Zoox, where I develop machine learning models for autonomous robo-taxis.

Before this, I served as a Senior Research and Development Engineer at Kitware Inc., where I focused on diverse computer vision challenges, including change detection from overhead imagery, person identification, novel view synthesis, and atmospheric turbulence correction.

My practical experience is complemented by a strong academic foundation. I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kentucky, where my research focused on weakly supervised deep learning methods for image synthesis, semantic segmentation, and change detection.

I’m passionate about staying at the forefront of AI advancements. You can find examples of my work with Large Language Models (LLMs) on my Github, for example: LLM-Forge: A playground for building practical LLMs with limited compute resources

My areas of expertise include:

Autonomous Robotics: Developing and deploying computer vision systems for warehouse robots, enabling tasks like object picking and depalletizing.

Continual Learning: Implementing AI systems that continuously learn and adapt to new data without forgetting previous knowledge.

Production ML: Designing, implementing, and deploying machine learning models for real-time applications in production environments.

Multi-modal Understanding: Combining data from different sources, such as aerial and ground-level imagery, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a scene.

Vision-Language Models: Integrating computer vision and natural language processing to create AI systems that can understand both images and text.

Large-Scale Image Processing: Building and deploying systems for processing and analyzing large volumes of satellite and aerial imagery.

Academic Background

I completed my PhD at the University of Kentucky, where I was a member of the Multimodal Vision Research Lab. My research focused on combining information from multiple images for scene understanding and image synthesis. My PhD advisors were Dr. Nathan Jacobs and Dr. Samson Cheung

Professional Experience

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Bastian Solutions (Toyota): 2023 - present
- Developing computer vision and machine learning solutions for autonomous robotic systems.
Senior Research and Development Engineer, Kitware Inc.: Aug 2021 - May 2023
- Conducted research on change detection, person identification, and novel view synthesis.

Old Teaching Website

My old website, from my teaching days is available here.

Research Projects

Near-Remote Sensing

Diverse View Synthesis

Novel View Synthesis

Multi-Image Fusion

Weakly Supervised Segmentation