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Ashutosh Saxena Ashutosh Saxena
(B. Tech., Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur (India); MS and PhD, Stanford University)

Assistant Professor, Cornell University
Computer Science Department, 4159 Upson Hall, Cornell University
Phone: (607)255-7017 (office), areacode-ELE-1-LAB (cell)
asaxena at cs.stanford.edu (best way to reach me)
PhD advisor: Prof. Andrew Y. Ng



Research See my homepage, STAIR, and Make3d.stanford.edu.


Publications Publications page


Media Coverage Media Coverage


Projects Projects page


Awards Best paper, ICCV-3dRR, 2007.
Merit Scholarship, IIT Kanpur, India (2000-2004)
IEEE India Best Student Paper Award, 2002. (Best paper among all papers in 2002, whose first author is a student in India.)
National Talent Scholar, India (1998-2004). Awarded to top 500 students selected from all students in India.


Service Program Committee Reviewer
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2008-till date
  • International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2007-till date.
  • (IJCV had highest impact factor of 6.085 in all computer sciene, as well as all artificial intelligence journals in 2006.)
  • International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2006-till date.
  • Autonomous Robots - Robot Learning, 2008-till date
  • Reviewer, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2009.
  • Reviewer, Int'l Conf on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2009
  • Reviewer, Int'l Conf on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2009.
  • Reviewer/PC-member: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2008.
  • Machine Learning, Springer, 2007-2008.
  • IEEE RAS Magazine, 2008.
  • IEEE Int'l Conf on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2008.
  • IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2007.
  • Co-Reviewer, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2007.
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2007.
  • IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part B, 2005-2008.
  • Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 2005-2006
  • 11th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, 2004

IEEE Student Branch Mentor (India Section) 2003-2004
Coordinator, IIT Kanpur Electronics Club, 2002-2003


Teaching STAIR: Research Project in Artificial Intelligence (CS294a) in 2008.
STAIR: Research Project in Artificial Intelligence (CS294a) in 2007.
Machine Learning (CS 229) in 2005
I have co-supervised/worked with the following students:
  1. Shakti Sinha, I-Ting Fang, Rohan Jain (Sep 08 - till date)
  2. Sai Prasanth, Arvind Sujeeth (Sep 08 - Mar 09)
  3. Savil Srivastava (Apr 08 - Mar 09)
  4. Lawson Wong (Jan 07 - till date). Won Wegbreit Prize for best Honors Thesis on his contribution to Robotic Grasping. Will be PhD student at **** University.
  5. Siddartha Batra (Mar 08 - Dec 08). Now: CEO of Zunavision.
  6. Hee-Tae Jung (Oct 07 - till date), now Research Fellow at Stanford Law School.
  7. Brad Gulko (Apr 07 - May 08), now PhD student at Cornell University.
  8. Justin Pearson (Oct 07 - Dec 07), now at AeroVironment, Inc.
  9. Justin Driemeyer (Oct 05 - Jun 07), now at startup ****
  10. Min Sun (Jun 06 - Sep 07), now PhD student at Princeton University.
  11. Justin Kearns (Oct 05 - Aug 06), now research programmer at iRobots.
  12. For 3 month STAIR/CS229 projects: Tim Lipus, Nikolai Lakovlev (2007); David Ho, Seokchang Ryu (2006); Chioma Osondu (Oct 05 - Mar 06); Steve Chuang, Eric Shan (2005), Lawrence McAfee (Jan 08 - Jun 08), Nuwan Senaratna (Nov 07 - Mar 08), Kiyoshi Shikuma (May 08 - Sep 08)
  13. Anthony Xiao (Jun 04 - Sep 04, at CSIRO, Australia) for Honors thesis.
See more at STAIR manipulation, and Make3D. In addition, I have worked with Jeff Michels, Sung H. Chung, Ellen Klingbeil (now PhD student with Prof. Khatib), Morgan Quigley, Stephen Gould, Kaijen Hsiao, Paul Nangeroni, Manfred Huber, Christian Theobalt, Geremy Heitz, Quoc Le and Prof. Sebastian Thrun and Prof. Daphne Koller.


Experience 2008-present: Co-founder & CTO, Zunavision

Jun-Sep 2005: Microsoft Intern
Redmond, WA, USA
Invented a markov random field based learning model for an undisclosed purpose related to free-form text documents.

Jun-Sep 2004: Researcher (Industrial Trainee)
BioMedia Lab, CSIRO ICT Center, Commonwealth Sci. & Ind. Research Org. (CSIRO), Sydney, Australia
Invented a novel miniature 6-DOF wireless sourceless input device using inertial sensors.

May-Jul 2003: Analytical Research Summer Intern
Bose Corporation, Boston, USA
Developed models to predict speaker behavior.

May-Jul 2001: Research Summer Intern
Supervisor: Prof. Rajiv K. Varma, IIT Kanpur, India
Invented a wrist-worn wireless gadget that observes currents on human skin to prevent electrical shock.

2002-2004: Savior Electronics (founder)
Started a company called Savior Electronics for making wrist-worn electronic device to prevent electric shock. Won first prize in Megabucks, and seed money from SIDBI, IIT Kanpur, India.

1996-1999: Terraductus Software, one person company
In the days when pocket money was a luxury, selling dos based cheap software solutions to retail shops, used to get me some cash.


Courses At Stanford:

Spr 08: Computer Vision and Image Analysis.
Win 08: Modern Applied Statistics: Data Mining.
Fall 07: Modern Applied Statistics: Learning.
Spr 07: Experimental Robotics.
Win 07: Convex Optimization II.
Fall 06: Algorithms in Biology, Computational Models of Neocortex
Spring 06: Mathematical Programming and Combinatorial Optimization
Winter 06: Probabilistic Models in AI, Linear Dynamical Systems, Stanford AI Robot
Fall 05: Text Retrieval and Web Search
Spring 05: Convex Optimization (best course in the world); Cognitive Neuroscience; Colloqium on AI, Geometry, Graphics, Robotics and Computer Vision
Winter 05: Intro. to Computer Vision; Applied Vision and Imaging Systems; Independent Study: Learning Depth from Single Images
Fall 04: Intro. to Linear Dynamical Systems; Statistical Signal Processing; Machine Learning

Relevant courses at IIT Kanpur (India):
Artificial Intelligence, Detection and Estimation Theory, Neural Networks, Computational Brain, Image Processing, Digital Signal processing, Information and Coding Theory.


Hobbies Hiking, Skiing, Swimming. Some pictures.