Praveen Palanisamy
Lead Principal AI Engineer And Manager at Microsoft
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPraveen Palanisamy is a Lead Principal AI Engineer and manager with 13 years of experience building AI-first platforms for autonomous systems, currently leading the autonomy team for Microsoft Project AirSim in Bellevue. He blends deep research pedigree—from CMU and industry roles at GM where he invented multiple patents and built scalable deep RL training platforms—with hands-on engineering expertise in perception, planning, and simulation. Praveen has shipped production-grade autonomy stacks and improved devops for large open-source projects like the CARLA simulator, and contributed C++ LIDAR multi-object-tracking code that integrates EKF filtering and unsupervised clustering. Equally comfortable leading teams and rolling up his sleeves to refactor legacy code, he focuses on making high-fidelity simulation, training, and validation pipelines reliable and maintainable. Notably, he has been a founding autonomy engineer for Project AirSim and continues to drive AI engineering that bridges research breakthroughs to real-world autonomous mobility applications.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) at Vellore Institute of TechnologyMaster's Degree, Master's Degree at Carnegie Mellon UniversityHigh School, High School at Maharishi Vidhya Mandir, Chennai
Hindi, Tamil, English
Stackoverflow
546reputation
38kreached
14answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
pcl10
c-language10
python10
travis10
bash10
kalman-filter10
cicd10
build-automation10
cprogramming-language10
boost10
ros10
robotics9
opencv9
algorithm7
algorithms7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
praveen-palanisamy/multiple-object-tracking-lidar
Dec 2015 - Aug 2021
C++ implementation to Detect, track and classify multiple objects using LIDAR scans or point cloud
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Robotics Engineer
Back-end Developer / Robotics EngineerContributions:1 release, 36 commits, 6 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Praveen integrated unsupervised clustering into the object tracking node, enhancing the system's ability to identify and track multiple objects from LIDAR data. They implemented and refined an extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for stable multi-object tracking, demonstrating expertise in filtering techniques. Furthermore, the user refactored code, updated dependencies, and addressed build issues to ensure compatibility with newer versions of OpenCV and ROS. They added and updated changelogs.
pointcloudpoint-cloudsobject-detectionpcldetect
carla-simulator/carla
Nov 2018 - Feb 2019
Open-source simulator for autonomous driving research.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:10 commits, 5 PRs, 26 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Praveen primarily focused on improving the build and deployment process for the Carla simulator. They updated the build script to use environment-specific Python installations and modified the script to build Boost libraries for both Python 2 and Python 3. Furthermore, they made the Boost setup script generic for easier version upgrades and transitioned from a CI system to Travis, adjusting configuration accordingly. These changes suggest a focus on ensuring a reliable build process and enabling easier maintenance of the project's dependencies.
deep-reinforcement-learningsimulationcarlasimulatorsimulator-source
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