# Jiakai Zhang

> Staff Software Engineer at Waymo

Location: Fremont, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/jiakaizhang

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer in Perception @ Waymo
Jan 2020 – Present | California, United States
Technical lead (sensor fusion, object detection and tracking, and temporal modeling)

### Applied Scientist @ Amazon Robotics
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater Boston Area
Working on various object detection and identification approaches for millions of products in the AmazonFulfillment Center catalog (both singulated and clutter).

### Research Assistant @ CILVR Lab at New York University
Jan 2015 – Jan 2019
Deep learning and imitation learning

### Research Intern @ NVIDIA
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | New Jersey, US
•  Developed a navigation map system using Open Street Map. 
•  Designed a conditional imitation learning framework for real-time GPS following driving.
•  The system mimicked human-like driving behaviors by following navigation commands - lane following, lane changing, turn during intersection, exiting a highway, etc.

### Research Intern @ NVIDIA
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015
•  Designed and trained a CNN network for real-time lane following driving, running at over 20fps.
•  Achieved 98% autonomy in a 40-minute driving and generalization to the production environment - various road types, textures and weather conditions.

### Research Assistant @ Movement Lab at New York University
Jan 2012 – Jan 2015
•  Skeleton fitting human body shape by using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm
•  Point to point registration between different human poses and different identities by using non-rigid Iteration Closest Point Algorithm
•  Estimated the skeleton joints of a human articulated model and aligned correlated rigid parts between different pose shapes
•  Learned pose deformable models of human shape by encoding muscles and implemented skeleton-based body shape deformation

### Summer Intern @ Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Mountain View, California
•  Developed CUDA programming based real-time object detector using a deformable parts model.
•  Improved system runtime from 1fps to 10fps without compromising system accuracy

### Graphics Research Intern @ NVIDIA
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Santa Clara
• Real-time human facial expression tracking
• Dynamics texture mapping

### TA of Operating System @ New York University
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012

### Teaching Assistant and Session Leader @ New York University
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Greater New York City Area
•   Designed the 3D game programs which cover the collision detection, GPU rendering and physical simulation

•   Grading the students' homework and projects

### Software Developer @ The Center for Public Safety, Tsinghua University
Jan 2011 – Jan 2011
•   Accomplished 60,000-line C# project in 2 months, developed the software platform for Evacuation Simulation

•   Designed the real-time evacuation optimized algorithm by using reinforcement learning algorithm

### Research Assistant @ Robot Car Program, Tsinghua University
Jan 2010 – Jan 2010
•   Designed the algorithm of traffic sign recognition by using the Sparse Representation method to improve the robustness in shading or different illumination situations

•   Developed a probability model to estimate the position of the object, knowing the location under the World Coordinate System in the view plane

### Hardware Designer @ Robot Car Program, Tsinghua University
Jan 2009 – Jan 2010
•   Designed the hardware system of the whole project including the power system, mother board, the interface of network, etc.

•   Ported Linux Kernel to ARM and realized the communication between client and server.

•   Designed the program of control FPGA in VHDL


## Education
### Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Computer Science
New York University

### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science
New York University

### Bachelor in Engineering Physics
Tsinghua University

### Bachelor in Electrical and Computer Engineering
UC San Diego


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jiakaizhang
- Portfolio: http://www.jiakaizhang.com

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Source: https://flows.cv/jiakaizhang
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jiakaizhang/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12