My interests lie in solving real-world problems using computer vision and machine learning, and robotics. Specifically, I am interested in applied research in video analytics, machine learning, human-centric computer vision, and medical imaging.
I have completed my undergraduate at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia, in Electrical Engineering with great distinction standing 3rd from the faculty of engineering. I have served as junior faculty at Mekelle University before moving to my graduate studies at Vanderbilt. I have completed my PhD at Vanderbilt at the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Lab (RASL). I have completed my dissertation thesis on novel robotic and virtual reality system for autism and schizophrenia therapy while publishing several papers, two book chapters and a patent. My dissertation involved robotics, VR/AR, physiological signal processing, machine learning, and computer vision. While at Vanderbilt, I served as vice president for academic affairs of the Vanderbilt graduate students council (GSC) and as secretary of the organization for black graduate and professional students (OBGAPS). Moreover, I enjoyed personal side projects such as Kaggle machine learning competitions and I won 3rd place for EEG-based grasp detection for robotic prosthesis. I currently hold competition master rank at kaggle.com. Furthermore, I pitched a dexterous laparoscopic 6 DOF manipulator at TN TechVenture Challenge and earned runner-up title in 2013 and was regular hack Nashville/TN participant.
Currently, I am a National Academy of Sciences (NAS)/National Research Council (NRC) research fellow at the US naval research lab in Washington, D.C. My current research interests include person detection, person attributes analysis, person re-identification, object and anomaly recognition. I have extensive experience in the major machine learning frameworks and pytorch is my personal favorite.
PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016
Vanderbilt University
MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009
Vanderbilt University
BSC in Electrical Engineering, 2005
Bahir Dar University