In this episode, I talk with Shalini De Mello, who is a Principal Research Scientist and Research Lead at NVIDIA. Her research interests are in computer vision and machine learning for human-computer interaction and smart interfaces.

At NVIDIA, she has developed technologies for gaze estimation, 2D and 3D head pose estimation, hand gesture recognition, face detection, video stabilization and GPU-optimized libraries for mobile computer vision. Her research has been focused on human-computer interaction in cars and has led to the development of NVIDIA’s innovative DriveIX product for smart AI-based automotive interfaces for future generations of cars.

Shalini received her Masters and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Punjab Engineering College.

In this episode, we talk about her journey - about how she got started with Computer Vision and Machine Learning, from her Bahelor's to her Master's in Biomedical Imaging to her PhD work on Human Face Recognition - about how her research interests shaped over the years. We also talk about Machine Learning inside the car, about her vision of using Machine Learning & Deep Learning for building smart assistive interfaces for inside the car, and about how that manifested into the DriveIX product that NVIDIA recently launched. Among other things, we talk about the importance of open-sourcing technology, about the future of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, about the joys of learning something new everyday, about how to keep track of the every growing amount of research and much more. It was an absolute pleasure to talk with Shalini and learn from her research insights. I hope you like the conversation.

Shalini De Mello:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/shalinidemello

Website: https://research.nvidia.com/person/shalini-gupta

Links:

NVIDIA Drive IX: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/self-driving-cars/drive-ix/, https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-ix

Self-Supervised Viewpoint Learning From Image Collections: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2020-03_Self-Supervised-Viewpoint-Learning

Multi-sensor System for Driver’s Hand-Gesture Recognition: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/hand-gesture-recognition-3d-convolutional-neural-networks

AI Co-Pilot: RNNs for Dynamic Facial Analysis: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/ai-co-pilot-rnn-dynamic-facial-analysis/

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