Cheng Phoo
Software Engineer at Waymo
Cupertino, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolCheng Phoo is a software engineer and researcher with 11 years of experience specializing in multimodal perception and foundation models for vision and language. He completed a PhD at Cornell focusing on sample-efficient visual recognition, domain adaptation for remote sensing and LiDAR-assisted 3D detection, and published work on unsupervised discovery of mobile objects and few-shot learning. Cheng transitioned from academic research and high-profile internships (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Meta FAIR) to industry roles at Apple as a postdoc researcher on multimodal LLMs and now builds multimodal foundation models for Waymo’s onboard perception. He blends deep theoretical grounding with production-oriented engineering, routinely translating pre-trained foundation models into resource-efficient, domain-adapted systems. Based in Cupertino, Cheng pairs a strong math and CS background (University of Michigan) with hands-on experience in large-scale perception problems that bridge camera, LiDAR, and language modalities. An interesting thread through his work is leveraging unlabeled repeated-traversal LiDAR data to improve detection and adaptation in low-annotation domains.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Pure Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the ArtsDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science - Computer Vision and Machine Learning, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science - Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Cornell UniversityAmerican Degree Transfer Program Actuarial Science, American Degree Transfer Program Actuarial Science at INTI
English, Chinese, Malay
Github Skills (14)
pytorch9
python9
open-access9
deep-learning8
machine-learning8
data-science8
tensorflow8
jax6
jekyll6
science5
neural-network5
computer-science4
open-source3
scientific-computing3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
ecornelldev/CIS530
May 2019 - Sep 2019
Repo for all things code in Machine Learning (CIS530)
Contributions:31 commits, 6 PRs, 20 pushes in 4 months
deep-learningmachine-learningtensorflowdata-science
cpphoo/STARTUP
Mar 2021 - Mar 2022
Contributions:7 commits, 6 pushes, 1 branch in 11 months
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