Pratik Chaudhari, PhD

Biography

Pratik Chaudhari, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Systems Engineering department and a core faculty in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. He holds a secondary appointment in the Computer and Information Sciences department and is a member of the Applied Mathematics (AMCS) graduate group, Penn Institute for Computational Science (PICS), Center for AI-enabled Systems: Safe, Explainable, and Trustworthy (ASSET) and Center For AI And Data Science For Integrated Diagnostics (AI2D).

Previously, he held a joint position as a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services and a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Computing and Mathematical Sciences. Currently, he is an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services, where he focuses on building large language models.

He defended his PhD thesis in the Computer Science department at University of California, Los Angeles in 2018 where he worked with Stefano Soatto in the UCLA Vision Lab. He has Engineer’s (2014) and Master’s (2012) degrees in Aeronautics & Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked with Emilio Frazzoli at the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). He was in the Aerospace Engineering department at IIT Bombay for his undergraduate studies until 2010.

He has worked extensively on self-driving cars in the areas of motion planning and computer vision at nuTonomy Inc (now Hyundai-Aptiv Motional).