Towaki Takikawa

I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Toronto, supervised by Sanja Fidler and Alec Jacobson.

I also work as a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research on the Hyperscale Graphics Systems Research group.

My research interests focus on computer graphics and machine learning. Specifically, I'm interested in exploring a suitable representation for 3D geometry that is amenable to machine-learning driven geometry processing algorithms.

Outside of research, I also have experience working on both software and hardware for robotics related projects. I generally enjoy straddling the line between research and engineering.

I come from a small town in Oregon named Corvallis, but these days I hang out in Canada.

Blog / LinkedIn / GitHub / Google Scholar / Twitter

Email:
tovacinni-at-gmail-dot-com

Education

University of Toronto
Department of Computer Science
PhD Student
Computer Science
September 2020 -
Supervisors: Sanja Fidler and Alec Jacobson

University of Waterloo
Faculty of Mathematics
Bachelor of Mathematics
Major in Computer Science
September, 2016 - May, 2020

Publications

Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes
Towaki Takikawa*, Joey Litalien*, Kangxue Yin, Karsten Kreis, Charles Loop, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Alec Jacobson, Morgan McGuire, Sanja Fidler
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021
Oral Presentation
Project Website / Code / Video / Bibtex

A 3D Signed Distance Function Dataset
Towaki Takikawa, Andrew Glassner, Morgan McGuire
Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), 2021
Website and code coming soon!

Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation
Towaki Takikawa*, David Acuna*, Varun Jampani, Sanja Fidler
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019
Project Website / Code / Bibtex

Experience

	NVIDIA Research Scientist Toronto, ON, Canada February, 2021 - Present Manager: David Luebke Hyperscale Graphics Systems Research group.
	NVIDIA Research Scientist Intern Toronto, ON, Canada February, 2020 - February 2021 Mentor: Morgan McGuire Research on neural implicit surface representations.
	WATonomous Software Director / Mentor Waterloo, ON, Canada May, 2017 - May, 2020 Helping the team engineer a fully autonomous Cheverolet Bolt. Certified by GM as a designated test driver. Working across the pipeline on perception, prediction, localization, planning. Managing over 100+ students and 6 different software subteams.
	Preferred Networks Research Intern Tokyo, Japan May, 2019 - August, 2019 Mentor: Richard Calland, Tommi Kerola Research on weakly-supervised instance segmentation.
	NVIDIA Research Intern Toronto, ON, Canada January, 2019 - April, 2019 Mentor: David Acuna, Sanja Fidler Research on representation learning for semantic segmentation.
	University of Waterloo Research Assistant Waterloo, ON, Canada September, 2018 - May, 2020 Mentor: Yuri Boykov Research on weakly-supervised semantic segmentation and domain adaptation.
	NVIDIA Systems Software Engineering Intern Santa Clara, CA, USA May, 2018 - August, 2018 Worked in the autonomous vehicles engineering team. Developed data labeling and data recording systems in C / C++. Performed hardware verification and validation in the lab. Helped architect a hardware-based sensor synchronization system.
	Tulip Interfaces Software Engineering Intern Somerville, MA, USA May, 2017 - August, 2017 Worked on software infrastructure and internal tools.
	Active911 Software Engineering Intern Philomath, OR, USA June, 2016 - August, 2016 Worked on software infrastructure and backend development.
	Linn Benton Community College Software Engineering Intern Corvallis, OR, USA June, 2015 - August, 2015 Worked on curriculum development for an introductory CS course.
	Oregon State University Research Intern Corvallis, OR, USA June, 2014 - August, 2014 Mentor: Alex Groce Research in automated software verification and validation.