About me

PhD Student at UCSC

Email : mamoghad@ucsc.edu

 

I am a first year PhD student at UCSC in the Computer Engineering Department. I finished my undergraduate studies in Qazvin Azad University in Iran from the Electrical Control Engineering and finished my master studies at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey from the Control and Automation Engineering. When I finished my master degree, I made a smooth transition from Control methodologies to the Machine Learning techniques and their applications into the autonomous systems. I have been collaborating with the Eatron company in Turkey where they were aiming to design and implement a self-driving car. My first job was to apply the Deep Neural Networks for the estimation and fusion of the multi-sensor measurement of the autonomous vehicle for the environmental perception purpose. In addition to that, I was working on the decision-making center of the autonomous vehicle in which we were utilizing the Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques for the planning and high-level decision making of the self-driving car. My current research interests are the applications of machine learning techniques into the self-driving cars for both perception and decision making purposes. During my graduate studies in UCSC, I am planning to fuse the high-level decision making approaches with the low-level control strategies and apply them to the orientation and control of the self-driving cars.


Research Interests

- Machine Learning: Machine Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning, AI-based Decision Making Algorithms, Deep Q-Networks, Markov Decision Process, End-to-end Learning Techniques, Statistical Learning, Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition

- Machine Learning Applications: Self-driving Cars, Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), Autonomous Systems, Robotics, Driver Intention Prediction, Trajectory Classification, Autonomous Multi-agent Systems, Computer Vision

- Dynamics and Control: Nonlinear Control Strategies (Backstepping, Sliding Mode, Dynamic Inverse), Hybrid Control Systems, Robust and Adaptive Control Systems, Kalman Filtering

- Control Applications: Self-driving Cars, Robotics, Multi-agent Systems, Swarm Robotics

- Systems: ROS, Real-time Embedded Systems, Microcontrollers (PIC, DSPIC, AVR)

Professional Experience

Self-driving Car Researcher and Engineer at Eatron Technologies


- Developed a state-of-the-art sensor fusion algorithm for the object-level fusion of the radar, lidar, and smart camera sensors on autonomous car.
- Conducted research on the machine learning applications on advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).

Research Assistant at Istanbul Technical University


- Conducted research in deep reinforcement learning and deep learning approaches for the orientation and control of self-driving cars.
- Trained and tested a deep reinforcement learning agent for the high-level decision making process of the self-driving car in highway driving.
- Trained and tested an end-to-end deep learning algorithm for a self-driving car in Microsoft/AirSim simulation environment using an equipped on-board camera.
- Conducted research and simulated machine vision techniques for road, lane, and sign detection and diagnosis in a camera-equipped car.

Education

- University of California Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, USA, PhD Student in Computer Engineering, Sep. 2018 Field: Machine Learning and Autonomous Systems

- Istanbul Technical University Istanbul, Turkey, PhD Student in Electrical and Computer Engineering; GPA: 4.00, Jun. 2018 (Transferred to UCSC) Field: Machine Learning and Autonomous Systems

- Istanbul Technical University Istanbul, Turkey, Master of Science in Control and Automation Engineering; GPA: 3.94 (Best Student Award), Feb. 2016

- Islamic Azad University Qazvin, Iran Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering - Control Engineering; Sep. 2006 { Feb. 2011

Technical Skills


- Coding: Python, Keras, TensorFlow, C/C++, Mission Planner, APM Planner, Code Vision
- Parametric/Numerical Analysis: MATLAB, Mathematica
- Operating Systems:: ROS, macOS, Linux (Ubuntu), Microsoft Windows (XP, 7, Vista, 8, 10)
- Simulation: MATLAB-Simulink, PSpice
- Others: LaTeX, AutoCAD, Microsoft Office

Hubbies

Beside professional activities, I spend most of my spare time playing soccer and doing exercises. I also play piano in which I am on the intermediate level. I am also a social person who likes to meet new people in order to find out the various cultures and languages.

Languages

English, Persian, Turkish, Azerbaijani