Nick Rhinehart
Assistant Professor at University of Toronto
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNick Rhinehart is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto leading the LEAF lab, where he develops principled robot learning algorithms for safe, embodied autonomous systems. With 13 years of experience spanning a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon, a postdoc at UC Berkeley, and research leadership at Waymo, he blends model-based and model-free reinforcement learning, imitation learning, information theory, and deep learning. His work emphasizes algorithmic efficiency and real-world robustness, informed by hands-on roles in industry perception and test automation. Nick also contributes to open-source tooling—improving stability and backwards compatibility in projects like sqlitedict—highlighting his attention to reproducibility and engineering rigor. Based in Berkeley and now Toronto, he bridges cutting-edge research with deployable systems for complex environments.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. and B.A. General Engineering and Computer Science, B.S. and B.A. General Engineering and Computer Science at Swarthmore CollegeDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Robotics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (5)
sqlite10
python10
testing10
test-automation9
multithreading9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
piskvorky/sqlitedict
Oct 2015 - Oct 2015
Persistent dict, backed by sqlite3 and pickle, multithread-safe.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:10 commits, 2 PRs, 3 comments in 19 days
Contributions summary:Nick primarily focused on enhancing the `sqlitedict` library's robustness through the implementation of a read-only flag and associated tests. Their contributions involved adding the `VALID_FLAGS` class attribute and incorporating tests to verify the read-only functionality. These changes included tests for both writing and deleting operations, and included updates to support python 2.6, improving the library's stability and backwards compatibility.
pythonpicklerustdata-storemulti-threading
nrhinehart/precog_carla_dataset
May 2019 - May 2020
Small example for loading the CARLA data from the PRECOG paper
Contributions:10 commits, 7 pushes, 2 comments in 1 year
carlakitti-datasetlidarstereo
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