Randy Sargent
Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolRandy Sargent is a Senior Systems Scientist in Pittsburgh with 19 years of experience building robotics, machine vision, visualization, and networking software across academia, government, and industry. He blends hands-on engineering and teaching—having lectured at MIT and led open-source robotics education efforts—with deep research and product work at Carnegie Mellon, NASA Ames, and a multi-year visiting stint at Google. Randy co-founded and scaled engineering startups (including Newton Research Labs and Findchips.com) and has shipped mission-critical vision tools used in planetary rover and remote sensing projects. An active open-source contributor, he improved portability and reliability in NASA’s Vision Workbench, adding practical features like quadtree enhancements and progress callbacks that eased cross-platform adoption. He combines entrepreneurial grit with a habit of cleaning and refactoring legacy code, making complex perception and autonomy systems more maintainable and portable.
19 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
MS MIT Media Laboratory, MS MIT Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (6)
algorithms10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
image-processing10
tiff9
jpeg8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
visionworkbench/visionworkbench
Feb 2007 - Apr 2009
The NASA Vision Workbench is a general purpose image processing and computer vision library developed by the Autonomous Systems and Robotics (ASR) Area in the Intelligent Systems Division at the NASA Ames Research Center.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:72 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Randy primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and portability of the Vision Workbench library. Their contributions involved fixing bugs, adding features like a padding flag to the quadtree generation, and refactoring code to improve compatibility with various compilers and platforms, particularly MSVC. The user also addressed potential issues with image processing by modifying and improving the quadtree naming scheme, along with the inclusion of a progress callback, further improving the usability and reliability of the library. Several commits were focused on code cleanup, such as changing declarations and including const specifiers.
asrcomputer-visionimage-processingrobotics
CMU-CREATE-Lab/python-utils
Dec 2014 - Dec 2022
Python utilities and libraries, including for ESDR
Contributions:2 releases, 96 commits, 101 pushes in 8 years
python
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