Academic & Research Experience

Aug 2025 – Present

Associate Professor (Tenure-track)

Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, MI, USA
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, College of Arts & Sciences.
Teaching multimodal machine learning, computer vision, and autonomous systems. Establishing the Multimodal Perception Lab. Executive board member, Robofest autonomous robotics competition.

Sep 2021 – Aug 2025

Research Scientist

RIKEN Guardian Robot Project, Nagoya, Japan
One of six collaborative teams developing a social humanoid robot. Led multimodal learning research covering missing modality robustness, weak supervised learning, and audio-visual perception for human-robot interaction.

Jul 2017 – Sep 2021

Assistant Professor

Toyota Technological Institute (TTI), Nagoya, Japan
Led deep sensor fusion research for autonomous driving in collaboration with Toyota, Denso, Nippon Soken, Aisin, and Tier IV. Developed RVNet, SO-Net, ChiNet, PsiNet, and BVTNet frameworks. Resulted in 7 Japanese patents.

Nov 2013 – Jun 2017

Postdoctoral Researcher

Toyota Technological Institute (TTI), Nagoya, Japan
Sensor fusion for intelligent mobility: visible-thermal camera fusion, traffic light detection, lane estimation, and road surface segmentation using deep learning.

Nov 2011 – Oct 2013

Postdoctoral Researcher

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Collaborated with Philips Research and Eagle Vision on automatic extrinsic calibration of non-overlapping camera networks and appearance-based person re-identification using Bayesian methods and particle swarm optimisation.

Jun 2021 – Aug 2025

External Faculty

SSN College of Engineering & REC, Chennai, India
Taught Intelligent Mobility and Robotics Courses, Supervised graduate research students in computer vision and multimodal machine learning.

Industry & Service

Ongoing

Industry Collaborations

Previous research partnerships with Denso, Nippon Soken, Aisin, Toyota R&D Labs, and Tier IV on autonomous driving perception and sensor fusion.

Ongoing

Reviewer & Committee Member

Regular reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, Pattern Recognition, IEEE CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, IROS, ICRA, and ACM Multimedia. Area chair and programme committee member for international conferences.

Ongoing

Executive Board Member — Robofest

Lawrence Technological University's autonomous robotics competition promoting STEM education for K–12 and college students internationally.