Michael Firman
Senior Staff Research Scientist at Niantic Spatial, Inc.
United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Firman is a Senior Staff Research Scientist with 12 years of experience building production-grade machine learning and computer vision systems that power spatial and AR products used by millions. He blends deep academic expertise—a PhD in computer vision and 15+ top-tier publications—with hands-on engineering, leading teams at Niantic to ship depth estimation, 3D reconstruction, Gaussian splatting, and generative scene models at scale. He co-founded a startup acquired by Niantic and has driven projects from rapid prototypes to multi-year global pipelines that run on mobile and cloud. An active contributor to open-source depth work (e.g., improvements around monodepth2), he is now exploring spatial, context-aware AI that can remember and act on world knowledge to assist real users.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Engineering Design, Master of Engineering - MEng Engineering Design at University of BristolUniversity College London
Github Skills (10)
neural-network10
depth-estimation10
computer-vision10
pytorch10
deep-learning10
python10
modeling9
trainings9
tensorboard8
scikit-image7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
nianticlabs/monodepth2
May 2019 - Jun 2021
[ICCV 2019] Monocular depth estimation from a single image
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 29 commits, 2 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the project by addressing issues and improving the existing codebase related to depth estimation models. They fixed bugs in the model loading and visualization, updated dependencies, and improved logging. Furthermore, the user made modifications to the training scripts and added options for different model configurations, suggesting a focus on model training and evaluation. Overall, the contributions reflect a focus on maintaining and enhancing the model's functionality and usability.
pytorchself-supervisioniccviccv-2019monocular-depth-estimation
mdfirman/cropper
Nov 2015 - Mar 2016
Contributions:50 commits, 7 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
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