Ashwin Swaminathan
About Me
Currently, I am a Senior Director, Perception at Magic Leap, Inc. Here, I lead the World sensing team that includes critical Perception components such as SLAM, Online Calibration, World Reconstruction, Object Recognition and Scene Understanding. I am responsible for defining the sensor configuration, compute architecture, and algorithms for World sensing stack for ML2 working with the team.
I also serve as the engineering lead for Magic Leap’s AR-cloud solution for Perception that includes:
Content Persistence
Multi-user sharing
Large Scale Mapping
World understanding and
AR Cloud
My team and I are responsible for end-to-end development including algorithm research, architecture design, engineering, prototype, and integration.
Check out our recent feature releases on ML1:
Persistence and sharing features in MagicVerse SDK for ML1 Lumin OS (May 2019)
XRKit on iOS and Android (March 2020), and
Object recognition for generic objects with 3D bounding boxes (March 2020).
Previously, I was a Senior Staff Engineer/Manager at Qualcomm Research where I was involved in building computer vision and machine learning algorithms for Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets for various usecases - Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Drones. I also lead various academic research collaborations within Qualcomm and serve as a member of the Qualcomm patent review board.
Prior to joining Qualcomm Research, I obtained my Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and my M.S. and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. My thesis was on Multimedia Forensics via Intrinsic and Extrinsic Fingerprints and this work focuses on various problems related to information security and multimedia forensics.
During my days as a Ph.D. student at UMD, I did internships with the Mobile and Media Systems Lab at Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, CA (2006) on projects related to Digital Rights Management and with the Machine learning and Applied Statistics Lab at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA (2007).
News
April 2021: Our tutorial on "Building Digital Twins for Large Scale Augmented Reality" has been accepted at ICCV 2021.
April 2021: Elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior member for my contributions to the profession
November 2020: Check out my talk at EdgeAI on "Spatial Computing: A Collision of Edge and Cloud Computing"
November 2020: Presented a tech talk at IIIT Hyderabad "Perception needs for Spatial Computing headsets: Edge and Cloud"
October 2020: Presented a tech talk at Rochester Institute of Technology on "Perception needs for Spatial Computing headsets"
March 2020: Generic Object recognition with 3D bounding boxes released in latest Lumin update.
March 2020: MagicVerse SDK for XRKit on iOS and Android released
October 2019: Promoted to Senior Director, Perception.
June 2019: Check out our tutorial at CVPR on Perception at Magic Leap.
May 2019: Persistence and sharing features in MagicVerse SDK for ML1 Lumin OS.
January 2019: Moved to start working on World Sensing.
August 2018: Released Magic Leap One!
April 2017: Promoted to Distinguished Fellow/Manager at Magic Leap, Inc.
December 2015: Joined Magic Leap as Principal Engineer, Perception and moved to the bay area.
May 2015: Four of my patents with Qualcomm co-authors on Computer vision, Augmented reality, and peer-to-peer networks got approved by USPTO.