Piotr Dollar
Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab
Menlo Park, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPiotr Dollar is a technical staff engineer and computer vision researcher with 15+ years of experience spanning academia and industry, including senior research leadership at Meta and roles at Microsoft and Caltech. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC San Diego and is now based in Menlo Park, California, blending deep research rigor with production-focused engineering. Piotr has significant open-source impact in vision tooling—contributions to widely used projects like the COCO API and Facebook’s pycls demonstrate expertise in dataset tooling, model implementations, performance optimizations and novel activation support. His work on the Structured Edge Detection toolbox and edge proposal evaluation highlights a long-standing focus on efficient, low-level implementations in C++ and MATLAB as well as PyTorch refactoring for maintainability. Colleagues know him for turning complex research code into robust, reusable engineering artifacts that improve both memory/performance profiles and developer ergonomics.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San DiegoBachelor of Arts - BA Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts - BA Computer Science at Harvard University
Github Skills (21)
pytorch10
c-language10
python10
api-design10
c1110
data-structure10
refactor10
c1710
deep-learning10
data-structures10
object-detection10
computer-vision10
refactoring10
edge-detection10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
pdollar/edges
Jun 2014 - Jul 2016
Structured Edge Detection Toolbox
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:31 commits, 3 pushes, 14 comments in 2 years
Contributions summary:Piotr primarily worked on optimizing and refactoring C++ code within the `edges/private` directory. Their contributions included minor optimizations and commenting in `edgesNmsMex.cpp`. They also made modifications to `edgeBoxes.m` by moving relevant code and updating the demo file. Further, they were involved in adding object proposal evaluation code and parameter sweeps.
structuredtoolboxobject-detectionedgeedge-detection
cocodataset/cocoapi
Dec 2014 - Jan 2020
COCO API - Dataset @ http://cocodataset.org/
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:113 commits, 2 PRs, 74 pushes in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Piotr primarily focused on enhancing the COCO API, introducing new functions and refactoring existing ones. Their work included adding features like support for different annotation types (instances and captions), run-length encoding for masks, and functions for downloading images. Furthermore, the user revamped the API for better performance, memory usage, and added improvements for handling keypoint and area ranges.
apidataset-apidatasetcocococodataset
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