Karl Willis
Senior Research Manager - Head Of Model Operations
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKarl Willis is a senior research manager and Head of Model Operations at Autodesk with 18 years of experience bridging academic rigor and product delivery in computational design and AI. He founded and leads model delivery and operations teams at Autodesk, translating research prototypes from his PhD work into scalable production systems for design and engineering workflows. Karl’s background spans research roles at Disney Research and Microsoft, startup product leadership (including a VP role at a 3D-printing electronics company), and founding a design-focused startup, giving him rare fluency across research, product, and manufacturing domains. Based in San Francisco, he combines deep technical training with pragmatic leadership, often surfacing unexpected insights about design–AI integration drawn from hands-on prototyping and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
18 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
UNSW SydneyBachelor of Computer Graphic Design Time Based Media, Bachelor of Computer Graphic Design Time Based Media at Wanganui School of DesignDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computational Design, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon UniversityMaster of Design Product Design, Master of Design Product Design at University of Tsukuba
Japanese, English
Github Skills (66)
drawing10
siggraph10
3d-reconstruction10
openscad10
fusion10
structure-from-motion10
mesh9
data-tools9
3d9
ssdp9
point-cloud8
voxel8
deep-learning7
graph-convolutional-networks7
autoencoder7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
karldd/Alchemy
Oct 2007 - Oct 2018
Contributions:552 commits, 2 PRs, 19 pushes in 11 years 2 months
drawing
AutodeskAILab/Fusion360GalleryDataset
Mar 2020 - Apr 2022
Data, tools, and documentation of the Fusion 360 Gallery Dataset
Contributions:4 reviews, 422 commits, 17 PRs in 2 years 1 month
structure-from-motiondataset3d-reconstructionfusionsiggraph
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