Chang Gao

Latest update: Sep 2024

Current focus: LLM, VLM, end-to-end perception, multimodal machine learning, human-robot interaction

I obtained my B.Eng in Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong and M.S. in Computer Vision at Carnegie Mellon University. My past research focused on AI, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and Computer Graphics, with paper published at SIGGRAPH, IEEE GRSL (feat. on cover, 2018), and ACCV (Best Application Paper Award, 2018). I have also been reviewing conference papers at AAAI, WACV, BMVC, etc.

I am currently a Tech Lead and Senior Software Engineer at Waymo Perception team, shipping multimodal spatial-temporal algorithms and machine learning models to both the autonomous vehicles and the remote cloud services. I also lead a part of the Perception system that utilizes large vision language models (VLMs) to improve Waymo's human-robot interaction and safety. I have obtained 10+ spot bonuses by launching multiple impactful products and being a strong and caring team player.

Although I mostly code for closed source projects (400k+ lines of code at Waymo), I also enjoy publishing open source code on GitHub, such as nanoGPT.jax, nanoDiffusion, semantic-tsdf. I developed WoodenFish3D app for Apple Vision Pro, providing immersive meditation by wooden fish tapping. I have 4k+ followers on Clubhouse (@changgy) too, sharing my thoughts on AI and robots.