Ashish Kapoor

I am a researcher with the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. These days I am focusing on Aerial Informatics and Robotics. I am interested in building intelligent and autonomous flying agents that are safe and enable applications that can positively influence our society. The core technology builds upon cutting edge research in machine intelligence, robotics and human-centered computation, in order to enable an entire fleet of flying robots that range from micro-UAVs to commercial jetliners. Various application scenarios include Weather Sensing, Monitoring for Precision Agriculture, Safe Cyber-Physical Systems, etc.

More broadly, I am interested in Machine Learning, Quantum Computation and Computer Vision, with applications in User Modeling, Affective Computing and HCI scenarios. I did a PhD at the MIT Media Lab, and my Doctoral thesis looked at building Discriminative Models for Pattern Recognition with incomplete information (semi-supervised learning, imputation, noisy data etc.). A significant part of that work involved automatic analysis of non-verbal behavior (e.g. Facial Action Analysis, see Master’s thesis) and physiological responses. The earliest part of my research career tackled the problem of photorealistic facial animations.

I am also an avid aviator and hold FAA Commercial Pilot certificate (SEL), FAA Flight Instructor certificate (Airplane Single Engine and Instrument Airplane). I am an active amateur aircraft builder and recently finished building an RV-8 Aircraft (see: RV-8 build blog ).