Abstract

In this talk I will focus on the following questions: What does it take to succeed in machine learning? Do you need a PhD? Do you need papers? What does the field look like? What are the different roles? And where could you fit in? I will cover these questions through my personal story - from dropping out of Waterloo to building startups in Silicon Valley, as well experiences from friends at Google Research, OpenAI, Facebook, and many startups in the Bay Area.

Speaker Biography

Agastya Kalra is a founding member at Akasha Imaging where he leads the computer vision and machine learning team. He works on the intersection of computational imaging, geometry, and machine learning. He has published papers at top tier conferences such as NeuIPS, CVPR, and ICCV and filed over 15 patents in computational imaging. After dropping out of Waterloo at age 19, he served as an early engineer and Director of Deep Learning at Focal Systems building cameras for retail, and now he's a founding member and principal engineer building cameras using polarization at Akasha Imaging.