Ran Yoo
Software Engineer at Meta
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Tian is a robotics-focused research scientist with eight years of experience building and aligning large embodied models for real-world autonomous systems. Currently at NVIDIA after a stint at Waymo, he specializes in post-training alignment and skill mastery for robotics foundation models, with applied work spanning autonomous driving, motion planning, and embodied agents. His PhD from UC Berkeley produced novel algorithms addressing safety and lifecycle alignment—from pre-training to deployment—and has earned multiple industry awards including ICRA Best Paper and the Qualcomm and Baidu fellowships. Thomas combines deep academic rigor with production-minded research, repeatedly translating generative and vision-language model advances into practical driving and robotics solutions. Based in San Francisco, he has a track record of using expert preference queries and efficient post-training techniques to make models behave more human-aligned in interaction-heavy settings.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at University of MichiganSummer STEM Program: Computer Science and Entrepreneurship, Summer STEM Program: Computer Science and Entrepreneurship at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and ArtStuyvesant High School
English, Korean, Spanish
Github Skills (21)
reasoning9
ros8
nvidia8
robotics8
simulator8
unreal-engine-47
autonomous-driving7
deep-reinforcement-learning7
computer-vision7
carla6
autonomous-vehicles6
deep-learning6
ai6
self-driving-car6
imitation-learning6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
thomasrantian/Awesome-Inverse-Reinforcement-Learning
Nov 2019 - Mar 2020
Literature and code for inverse reinforcement leanring research
Contributions:4 commits, 4 pushes in 3 months
thomasrantian/Human-Gesture-Recognition-Through-Skeleton-Estimation
Dec 2018 - Jul 2019
Contributions:13 commits, 17 pushes, 1 branch in 7 months
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