Tarik Kelestemur
Applied Scientist at The Boston Dynamics AI Institute
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolTarik Kelestemur is an Applied Scientist at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute with 11 years of experience building vision-driven, whole-body mobile manipulation systems for real-world robotics. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University where his research fused probabilistic methods, implicit neural representations, and tactile sensing to enable sample-efficient visual-tactile pose and shape estimation used in precise manipulation. Before BD-AI, he was a Machine Learning Engineer at Covariant, troubleshooting and improving perception and grasping stacks across deployed pick-and-place robots and bridging simulation-to-reality data pipelines. Tarik has a strong full-stack robotics background—from TrajOpt trajectory planners and Gaussian processes to deep RL and Mask-RCNN—plus hands-on experience creating data generation, augmentation, and deployment workflows. He co-hosts an AI/ML podcast, signaling a knack for communicating complex ideas, and has repeatedly combined classical modeling with data-driven learning to tackle contact-rich robotic tasks.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering (B.S.), Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (B.S.), Electrical and Electronics Engineering at TOBB Ekonomi ve Teknoloji ÜniversitesiDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Engineering at Northeastern University
Turkish, English
Github Skills (97)
gymnasium10
q-learning10
ros-driver10
mujoco10
robotics9
convolutional-neural-networks9
simulations9
openai-gym9
toolbox9
robustness9
stable-baselines9
ros9
simulation9
physics-engine9
robot9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
tkelestemur/frasier_openrave
Mar 2018 - Feb 2021
Contributions:46 commits, 7 pushes in 2 years 11 months
tkelestemur/veritezgahi
Aug 2020 - Feb 2025
Contributions:4 pushes, 3 branches in 4 years 6 months
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