Ann Arbor AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision Meetup

Join our in-person meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Dec 9, 2025
5:30 - 8:30 PM

Preregister to reserve your spot

Cahoots Coworking Space
206 E Huron St,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Stay tuned! More speakers to be announced shortly.

Challenges and Opportunities for AI in Marine Robotics

Underwater robots are essential tools for ocean exploration. This presentation will explore new technology in robotics and artificial intelligence that can enable automated detection of shipwreck sites from sonar data collected from autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). We will also discuss our recent work on underwater mapping and 3D reconstruction towards real-time dense mapping of shipwreck sites from sonar and camera imagery. Results will be demonstrated on data from field trials in Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron.

About the Speaker

Katie Skinner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Robotics at the University of Michigan. She received an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan, and a B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a Certificate in Applications of Computing from Princeton University. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award.

Building Smarter AV Simulation with Neural Reconstruction and World Models

This talk explores how neural reconstruction and world models are coming together to create richer, more dynamic simulation for scalable autonomous vehicle development. We’ll look at the latest releases in 3D Gaussian splatting techniques and world reasoning and generation, as well as discuss how these technologies are advancing the deployment of autonomous driving stacks that can generalize to any environment. We’ll also cover NVIDIA open models, frameworks, and data to help kickstart your own development pipelines.

About the Speaker

Katie Washabaugh is NVIDIA’s Product Marketing Manager for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation, focusing on virtual solutions for real world mobility. A former journalist at publications such as Automotive News and MarketWatch, she joined the NVIDIA team in 2018 as Automotive Content Marketing Manager. Katie holds a B.A. in public policy from the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.

In-Cabin Intelligence: AI's Vision for Predictive Cabin Safety

Current in-cabin monitoring systems react to distractions and drowsiness after they occur. Cabin AI: Predictive Safety introduces a paradigm shift using multi-modal sensor fusion and deep learning to anticipate dangerous states before they manifest. By analyzing driver gaze, occupant behavior, and physiological signals, these systems predict impairment, distraction, and risky activities with over 95% accuracy, meeting stringent Euro NCAP 2025 requirements. This proactive approach not only prevents accidents but builds passenger trust in autonomous vehicles. Discover how predictive algorithms are transforming cabin sensing from a compliance checkbox into a core safety differentiator.

About the Speaker

Vijayachandar Sanikal, IEEE Senior Member, is a visionary automotive leader with 20+ years pioneering AI-driven thermal optimization and cloud-based simulation for electric and autonomous vehicles. He builds intelligent mobility solutions at the intersection of digital twins, software-defined vehicles, and sustainable innovation.

From Raw Sensor Data to Reliable Datasets: Physical AI in Practice

Modern mobility systems rely on massive, high-quality multimodal datasets — yet real-world data is messy. Misaligned sensors, inconsistent metadata, and uneven scenario coverage can slow development and lead to costly model failures. The Physical AI Workbench, built in collaboration between Voxel51 and NVIDIA, provides an automated and scalable pipeline for auditing, reconstructing, and enriching autonomous driving datasets.

In this talk, we’ll show how FiftyOne serves as the central interface for inspecting and validating sensor alignment, scene structure, and scenario diversity, while NVIDIA Neural Reconstruction (NuRec) enables physics-aware reconstruction directly from real-world captures. We’ll highlight how these capabilities support automated dataset quality checks, reduce manual review overhead, and streamline the creation of richer datasets for model training and evaluation.

Attendees will gain insight into how Physical AI workflows help mobility teams scale, improve dataset reliability, and accelerate iteration from data capture to model deployment — without rewriting their infrastructure.

About the Speaker

Daniel Gural leads technical partnerships at Voxel51, where he’s building the Physical AI Workbench, a platform that connects real-world sensor data with realistic simulation to help engineers better understand, validate, and improve their perception systems. With a background in developer relations and computer vision engineering,

Join our virtual meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across Visual AI for Physical AI use cases.

Date, Time and Location

Dec 11, 2025
9:00-11:00 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom!

From Data to Open-World Autonomous Driving

Data is key for advances in machine learning, including mobile applications like robots and autonomous cars. To ensure reliable operation, occurring scenarios must be reflected by the underlying dataset. Since the open-world environments can contain unknown scenarios and novel objects, active learning from online data collection and handling of unknowns is required. In this talk we discuss different approach to address this real world requirements.

About the Speaker

Sebastian Schmidt is a PhD student at the Data Analytics and Machine Learning group at TU Munich and part of an Industrial PhD Program with the BMW research group. His work is mainly focused on Open-world active learning and perception for autonomous vehicles.

From Raw Sensor Data to Reliable Datasets: Physical AI in Practice

Modern mobility systems rely on massive, high-quality multimodal datasets — yet real-world data is messy. Misaligned sensors, inconsistent metadata, and uneven scenario coverage can slow development and lead to costly model failures. The Physical AI Workbench, built in collaboration between Voxel51 and NVIDIA, provides an automated and scalable pipeline for auditing, reconstructing, and enriching autonomous driving datasets.

In this talk, we’ll show how FiftyOne serves as the central interface for inspecting and validating sensor alignment, scene structure, and scenario diversity, while NVIDIA Neural Reconstruction (NuRec) enables physics-aware reconstruction directly from real-world captures. We’ll highlight how these capabilities support automated dataset quality checks, reduce manual review overhead, and streamline the creation of richer datasets for model training and evaluation.

Attendees will gain insight into how Physical AI workflows help mobility teams scale, improve dataset reliability, and accelerate iteration from data capture to model deployment — without rewriting their infrastructure.

About the Speaker

Daniel Gural leads technical partnerships at Voxel51, where he’s building the Physical AI Workbench, a platform that connects real-world sensor data with realistic simulation to help engineers better understand, validate, and improve their perception systems. With a background in developer relations and computer vision engineering,

Building Smarter AV Simulation with Neural Reconstruction and World Models

This talk explores how neural reconstruction and world models are coming together to create richer, more dynamic simulation for scalable autonomous vehicle development. We’ll look at the latest releases in 3D Gaussian splatting techniques and world reasoning and generation, as well as discuss how these technologies are advancing the deployment of autonomous driving stacks that can generalize to any environment. We’ll also cover NVIDIA open models, frameworks, and data to help kickstart your own development pipelines.

About the Speaker

Katie Washabaugh is NVIDIA’s Product Marketing Manager for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation, focusing on virtual solutions for real world mobility. A former journalist at publications such as Automotive News and MarketWatch, she joined the NVIDIA team in 2018 as Automotive Content Marketing Manager. Katie holds a B.A. in public policy from the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.

Relevance of Classical Algorithms in Modern Autonomous Driving Architectures

While modern autonomous driving systems increasingly rely on machine learning and deep neural networks, classical algorithms continue to play a foundational role in ensuring reliability, interpretability, and real-time performance. Techniques such as Kalman filtering, A* path planning, PID control, and SLAM remain integral to perception, localization, and decision-making modules. Their deterministic nature and lower computational overhead make them especially valuable in safety-critical scenarios and resource-constrained environments. This talk explores the enduring relevance of classical algorithms, their integration with learning-based methods, and their evolving scope in the context of next-generation autonomous vehicle architectures.

Prajwal Chinthoju is an Autonomous Driving Feature Development Engineer with a strong foundation in systems engineering, optimization, and intelligent mobility. I specialize in integrating classical algorithms with modern AI techniques to enhance perception, planning, and control in autonomous vehicle platforms.

This hands-on workshop introduces you to the Physical AI Workbench, a new layer of FiftyOne designed for autonomous vehicle, robotics, and 3D vision workflows. You’ll learn how to bridge the gap between raw sensor data and production-quality datasets, all from within FiftyOne’s interactive interface.

Date, Time and Location

Dec 16, 2025
9:00-10:00 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom!

Through live demos, you’ll explore how to:

• Audit: Automatically detect calibration errors, timestamp misalignments, incomplete frames, and other integrity issues that arise from dataset format drift over time.
• Generate: Reconstruct and augment your data using NVIDIA pathways such as NuRec, COSMOS, and Omniverse, enabling realistic scene synthesis and physical consistency checks.
• Enrich: Integrate auto-labeling, embeddings, and quality scoring pipelines to enhance metadata and accelerate model training.
• Export and Loop Back: Seamlessly export to and re-import from interoperable formats like NCore to verify consistency and ensure round-trip fidelity.

You’ll gain hands-on experience with a complete physical AI dataset lifecycle—from ingesting real-world AV datasets like nuScenes and Waymo, to running 3D audits, projecting LiDAR into image space, and visualizing results in FiftyOne’s UI. Along the way, you’ll see how Physical AI Workbench automatically surfaces issues in calibration, projection, and metadata—helping teams prevent silent data drift and ensure reliable dataset evolution.

By the end, you’ll understand how the Physical AI Workbench standardizes the process of building calibrated, complete, and simulation-ready datasets for the physical world.

Who should attend

Data scientists, AV/ADAS engineers, robotics researchers, and computer vision practitioners looking to standardize and scale physical-world datasets for model development and simulation.

About the Speaker

Daniel Gural leads technical partnerships at Voxel51, where he’s building the Physical AI Workbench, a platform that connects real-world sensor data with realistic simulation to help engineers better understand, validate, and improve their perception systems.

This technical workshop focuses on the data infrastructure required to build and maintain production-grade mobility datasets at fleet scale.

Date, Time and Location

Jan 14, 2026
9:00-10:00 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom!

We will examine how to structure storage, metadata, access patterns, and quality controls so that mobility teams can treat perception datasets as first-class, versioned “infrastructure” assets. The session will walk through how to design a mobility data stack that connects object storage, labeling systems, simulation environments, and experiment tracking into a coherent, auditable pipeline.

What you’ll learn:

• Model the mobility data plane: Define schemas for camera, LiDAR, radar, and HD, and represent temporal windows, ego poses, and scenario groupings in a way that is queryable and stable under schema evolution.
• Build a versioned dataset catalog with FiftyOne: Use FiftyOne customized workspaces and views to represent canonical datasets, and integrate with your raw data sources. All while preserving lineage between raw logs, the curated data, and simulation inputs.
• Implement governance and access control on mobility data: Configure role-based access and auditable pipelines to enforce data residency constraints while encouraging multi-team collaboration across research, perception, and safety functions.
• Operationalize curation and scenario mining workflows: Use FiftyOne’s embeddings and labeling capabilities to surface rare events such as adverse weather and sensor anomalies. Assign review tasks, and codify “critical scenario” definitions as reproducible dataset views.
• Close the loop with evaluation and feedback signals: Connect FiftyOne to training and evaluation pipelines so that model failures feed back into dataset updates

By the end of the workshop, attendees will have a concrete mental model and reference architecture for treating mobility datasets as a governed, queryable, and continuously evolving layer in their stack.