Thomas Whelan
Research Scientist at Meta
Cork, Munster, Ireland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Whelan is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs with 12 years' experience building real-time 3D scene understanding and SLAM systems, blending academic rigor from a PhD with hands-on engineering. Based in Cork, he helped develop widely used research codebases like ElasticFusion and Kintinuous and has deep expertise in CUDA-accelerated ICP and performance-driven backend work. His track record spans academia and industry—Dyson Research Fellow at Imperial College and PhD researcher at NUI Maynooth—where he moved prototypes into robust, large-scale reconstruction and localization systems. Known for pragmatic debugging, build-system modernization, and sensor-fusion research, he thrives at the intersection of novel mobile sensors, state estimation, and large-scale online inference.
12 years of coding experience
BSc, Computer Science & Software Engineering, 1st Class Honours, BSc, Computer Science & Software Engineering, 1st Class Honours at National University of Ireland, MaynoothColaiste Chiarain
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (15)
cuda10
image-reconstruction10
gpu-programming10
computer-vision10
c-language10
eigen10
parallel-computing10
cprogramming-language10
slam10
recovery10
3d-reconstruction10
build-system8
opengl8
cmake7
opencv5
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
mp3guy/Kintinuous
Oct 2015 - Aug 2022
Real-time large scale dense visual SLAM system
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 3 PRs, 14 pushes in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on improving the codebase by fixing bugs and updating dependencies. Their contributions include addressing resolution issues in CUDA code, updating the build process to use a revision of DBoW2 that doesn't require OpenCV3, and replacing outdated Sobel code. Furthermore, they also updated the build configurations and reflected pangolin updates.
cudareconstructiondenseslam-algorithmsscale
mp3guy/ElasticFusion
Oct 2015 - Oct 2022
Real-time dense visual SLAM system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:54 commits, 24 PRs, 51 pushes in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on bug fixes and improvements to the ElasticFusion codebase. Their contributions included addressing performance bottlenecks, such as slowdowns after saving, and resolving issues highlighted in specific bug reports. The user also made several code improvements, including the integration of external libraries. They demonstrated expertise in debugging and modifying existing code to enhance the functionality and stability of the SLAM system.
cudareconstructiondensevisual-slamreal-time
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