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Table of contents
General Information
| Full Name | Kai Ma |
| Citizenship | Canada, Finland (EU) |
Education
- 2021-2026
BASc, Mechatronics Engineering + AI Option
University of Waterloo - President’s Research Award, President's Scholarship of Distinction
Experience
- Sept '24 - Pres.
Software Engineer Intern, AV Perception
NVIDIA - Multi-sensor fusion for autonomous vehicles
- May '23 - Apr '24
Robotics Engineering Intern
Polymath Robotics - 3D object detection (LiDAR/Multi-modal) model training and deployment
- Sensor and node health monitoring for ROS 2 systems
- Costmap generation & ROS 2 integration for Compound Eye VIDAS cameras
- Sept - Dec '22
Research Intern
Vision and Image Processing Lab, University of Waterloo - FLAIROP project (with KIT, Festo, DarwinAI) to improve robotic grasping
- Supervised by Dr. Yuhao Chen and Dr. Alexander Wong
- Jan - Apr '22
Machine Learning Intern
National Research Council Canada / VIP Lab - COVID-Net project: improving performance and trustworthiness for AI-assisted chest radiography.
- Supervised by Dr. Pengcheng Xi and Dr. Alexander Wong.
- Jan - Apr '23
Undergraduate Research Assistant
University of Waterloo - Part-time research position automating object detection pipelines for robotic vision systems.
- Funded by President's Research Award.
- Extension of work done during co-op term with VIP Lab.
- Mar '22 - Aug '24
Research Engineer
WATonomous - Research on trajectory prediction and action recognition.
Academic Interests
-
Robotics / Artificial intelligence.
- Perception (deep learning, computer vision, 3D scene representation)
- Robot learning (reinforcement learning, planning, control)
- Localization & mapping (SLAM, state estimation, kinematics)
- Simulation and Sim2Real transfer
- Intelligent decision making, AI alignment, and foundation models
- Other impactful applications of AI (healthcare, agriculture, mining)
- Mechanical, electrical, and software integration for robotics
-
Emerging technologies.
- Quantum computing & quantum ML
- Human-computer interaction