Ashutosh Saxena is an

Indian-American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

computer scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and robotics. His research interests include deep learning, robotics, and 3-dimensional computer vision. Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of Caspar.AI, which is an artificial intelligence company that automates peoples' homes and builds applications such as fall detectors for senior living. Prior to Caspar.AI, Ashutosh co-founded Cognical Katapult (NSDQ: KPLT), which provides a no credit required alternative to traditional financing for online and omni-channel retail. Before Katapult, Saxena was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and faculty director of the RoboBrain Project at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

Education

Saxena received his bachelor's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the

Indian Institute of Technology The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are central government owned public technical institutes located across India. They are under the ownership of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India. They are governed by the Institu ...

Kanpur Kanpur or Cawnpore ( /kɑːnˈpʊər/ pronunciation (help·info)) is an industrial city in the central-western part of the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Founded in 1207, Kanpur became one of the most important commercial and military stations o ...

in 2004. In 2009, with artificial intelligence pioneer

Andrew Ng Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (; born 1976) is a British-born American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI. Ng was a co-founder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building ...

as his advisor, Saxena received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Career

In 2003, Ashutosh began his career as a research intern for

Bose Corporation Bose Corporation () is an American manufacturing company that predominantly sells audio equipment. The company was established by Amar Bose in 1964 and is based in Framingham, Massachusetts. It is best known for its home audio systems and speak ...

, where he developed mathematical models that use electronic circuits to engineer better speakers. Once Ashutosh completed his undergraduate degree, he became a researcher at the

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO ...

, where he developed algorithmic models for medical devices. From 2010 to 2013, Saxena was the chief scientist of New York-based Holopad, where he worked with Steven Spielberg's team to create walkthroughs and 3D experiences for his movie ''TinTin''. Before Caspar, Saxena pursued other entrepreneurial ventures, such as ZunaVision, an artificial intelligence startup he co-founded with

that uses AI to assign advertising space within videos. Ashutosh served as the CTO of ZunaVision from 2008 to 2010. After ZunaVision, Saxena co-founded Cognical Katapult, which provided financing solutions to nonprime and underbanked consumers powered by artificial intelligence. From 2014 to 2016, Saxena served as the faculty director of the RoboBrain project, which was a joint venture that he started between

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

, and the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

that made a knowledge engine for robots. Saxena co-founded Caspar.AI in 2015 with

David Cheriton David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the ...

, who serves as chief scientist. Caspar.AI has been widely covered in several outlets including Forbes Japan, and MIT Technology Review. Ashutosh has been recognized for his work by receiving the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2011,

Google Faculty Research Award Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. I ...

in 2012,

Microsoft Faculty Fellow Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

ship in 2012,

NSF Career award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

in 2013, One of the Eight Innovators to Watch by the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

in 2015, and received TR35 Innovator Award by

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

in 2018. He was named by San Francisco Business Times as a 40 under 40 young business leader.

Research

Saxena has authored over 100 published papers in the areas of deep learning, robotics, and 3D computer vision. His work in the fields of

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

and

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

have been featured in press releases and academic journal reviews. Ashutosh's early work includes the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) and Make3D, which enables the estimation of depth from a single image. At Cornell University, Ashutosh led the Robot Learning Lab, which used a machine learning approach to train robots to perform tasks in human environments such as generalizing manipulation in 3D point-clouds where robots learn to transfer manipulation trajectories to novel objects utilizing a large sample of demonstrations from crowdsourcing.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saxena, Ashutosh Stanford University alumni Living people Artificial intelligence researchers American roboticists Machine learning researchers Indian emigrants to the United States Year of birth missing (living people)