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 at NVIDIA Research on the Hyperscale Graphics Research group under Morgan McGuire.

My research interests focus on computer vision and computer graphics. 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.

Email:
takikawa-at-cs-dot-toronto-dot-edu
tovacinni-at-at-gmail-dot-com

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

(* Denotes equal contribution.)

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

NVIDIA
Research Intern
Toronto, ON, Canada
February, 2020 - Present

Mentor: Morgan McGuire
Research on machine learning for computer graphics on the Hyperscale Graphics Research group.

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.

Template: Jon Barron and Morgan McGuire