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Hi. I am Athindran, a machine learning engineer at Aurora Innovation.

I was a  PhD candidate in the department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. I was advised by Prof. Peter Ramadge. My research was focused on designing safety fallback mechanisms for autonomous systems with provable guarantees.

Publications

Journal Papers

1.  A. R. Kumar, K. -C. Hsu, P. J. Ramadge and J. F. Fisac, "Fast, Smooth, and Safe: Implicit Control Barrier Functions through Reach-Avoid Differential Dynamic Programming," in IEEE Control Systems Letters, doi: 10.1109/LCSYS.2023.3292132.

2.  Liang Heng, Athindran Ramesh Kumar, and Grace Gao. “Private proximity detection using partial GPS information.” IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems 52.6 (2016): 2873-2885.

Conference and Workshop Papers

1.  Ting-Han Fan, Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Peter J. Ramadge. “Safety Control for Prime Focus Spectrograph.” In 2022 56th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) (pp. 269-274). IEEE.

2.  Sulin Liu*, Athindran Ramesh Kumar*, Jaime F. Fisac, Ryan P. Adams, Peter J. Ramadge. “ProBF: Probabilistic Safety Certificates with Barrier Functions.” Presented at SafeRL workshop at NeurIPS 2021. Website

3.  Athindran Ramesh Kumar and Peter J. Ramadge. “Learning to Control Using a Convex Combination of Controllers.” 2021 American Control Conference (ACC). IEEE, 2021.

4.  Athindran Ramesh Kumar and Peter J. Ramadge, 2021, March. "DiffLoop: Tuning PID controllers by differentiating through the feedback loop.” In 2021 55th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

5.  Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Balaraman Ravindran, and Anand Raghunathan. “Pack and detect: Fast object detection in videos using region-of-interest packing.” Proceedings of the ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data. 2019.

6.  Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Liang Heng, and Grace X. Gao. “GPS privacy: Enabling proximity-based services while keeping GPS location private.” Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013),(Tampa, FL). 2014.

Patents Awarded

1.  Athindran R, Navinnath P, Klutto Milleth “Frequency Assignment for SINR and Throughput Management in Battlefield Communication”, India Patent granted 27th June 2024, Application No. : 201741038059

Theses

 Athindran Ramesh Kumar. Direct position tracking in GPS using vector correlator. Diss. 2015. (MS thesis)

Teaching experience

 Besides this, I have performed as a Teaching assistant through my grad school life for various courses:

1. Introduction to GNSS systems/GPS - Organized and led the lab sessions as a single TA for the course.

2. Introduction to Analog and Digital Signal Processing

3. Machine Learning for Predictive Data Analytics

4. Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition

5. Introduction to Data Science

6. Foundations of Engineering Physics

7. Introduction to Circuits

8. Introduction to Wireless Communication Systems

Service

Served as a reviewer for ICLR 2021, CISS 2022, NeurIPS 2022, L4DC 2023, ICML 2023, NeurIPS 2023, IJCAI 2024, TCST (Transaction on Control Systems Technology)