I am a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Zoox, working on world models and simulation for autonomous driving. Previously, I was a Staff Researcher and Technical Lead Manager at Waabi, where I led the World Models and Digital Twins team, and a Research Scientist at Uber ATG in Toronto. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, advised by Raquel Urtasun, and my B.Eng. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I worked with Cewu Lu and Gongshen Liu. As an undergraduate, I also spent a year at UIUC as a research intern with Bo Li, working on trustworthy machine learning.

My research aims to advance world modeling and simulation to enhance physical AI safety, with a focus on self-driving vehicles. I develop scalable and generalizable 4D world simulators from constrained, noisy sensory data using neural rendering and generative AI. Our simulators bridge the gap between simulation and reality, support closed-loop testing (with hardware in the loop), and generate physically plausible counterfactuals to rigorously test and improve autonomy. My long-term goal is to build spatial intelligence into autonomous systems for safer operation in the physical world.

Zoox
Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Waabi
Staff Researcher, TLM

Uber-ATG Toronto
Research Scientist

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Research Intern at Secure Learning Lab  

University of California, Berkeley
Research Intern at BAIR Lab  

Ava Pun (Undergrad, UWaterloo) safety-critical scenario generation, neural lighting simulation and inverse rendering, now PhD at CMU (first-author ICCV 2025 Best Paper, Marr Prize).
Gary Sun (Undergrad, UWaterloo) neural lighting estimation and simulation, now Quantitative Researcher at Citadel Securities.
Jay Sarva (Undergrad, Brown) adversarial closed-loop simulation, now Software Engineer at Databricks.
Rishi Menon (Undergrad, UWaterloo) generalizable asset reconstruction, now Research Engineer at Waabi.
Matthew Haines (Undergrad, UWaterloo) scalable and efficient neural rendering, now Research Intern at Tesla.
Henry Che (Undergrad, UIUC) unsupervised 4D reconstruction, generalizable 3D enhancer, now MS at UIUC and Research Intern at NVIDIA.
Tao Tu (PhD, Cornell) harmonization and blending with video models.
Jonathan Leung (Undergrad, UWaterloo) in-the-wild human reconstruction and 2D neural fixer, now Software Engineer Intern at Citadel.
Alicia Bremer (Undergrad, UWaterloo) unified camera and LiDAR simulation with 3DGS using ray tracing, now Software Developer at Waabi.
Lily Goli (PhD, UofT) 3D generative models from in-the-wild data.
Haojun Qiu (Undergrad, UofT) world models, now Researcher at Waabi and PhD at UofT.
Aom Pong (MS, Georgia Tech) generative reconstruction.
Daniel Ekpo (PhD, UMD) generalizable reconstruction.

Thanks jonbarron for this amazing work.