Zachary Sunberg
Assistant Professor at University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZachary Sunberg is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at CU Boulder with 11 years of experience bridging academic research and production-grade software. His background spans a PhD from Stanford, postdoctoral work at Berkeley, and hands-on engineering from internships at Google and Lockheed Martin to research roles in robotics and aerospace. He develops algorithms for decision-making under uncertainty and has contributed core implementations to the widely used JuliaPOMDP ecosystem and to ProgressMeter.jl, demonstrating both mathematical depth and pragmatic tooling skills. Known for translating control theory into reusable software, he blends rigorous modeling with test-driven engineering and occasional kernel-level optimizations. Based in Boulder, he pairs a commitment to democratic values and personal faith with a collaborative, open-source-first approach to research software.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Aerospace Engineering, BS, Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Aeronautics and Astronautics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University
Github Skills (8)
testing10
parallel-computing10
julia10
data-structure9
lib9
algorithm9
data-structures9
algorithms9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
JuliaPOMDP/POMDPs.jl
Jul 2015 - Nov 2022
MDPs and POMDPs in Julia - An interface for defining, solving, and simulating fully and partially observable Markov decision processes on discrete and continuous spaces.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 releases, 15 reviews, 442 commits in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Zachary made several commits focused on defining and implementing the core mathematical and programming structures for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) in Julia. They modified the `POMDPs.jl` file to include and export necessary types and functions related to these concepts, including `MDP`, `AbstractDistribution`, and other core functions. They also introduced default constructors for common data types like `Bool`, `Int`, and `Float64`. Further contributions included modifying the `gen` functions which were used to generate samples for different parts of the MDP.
pythonhidden-markov-modelcontrol-flowcontinuousspaces
timholy/ProgressMeter.jl
Mar 2016 - Apr 2020
Progress meter for long-running computations
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:16 commits, 15 PRs, 7 pushes in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Zachary primarily contributed to enhancing the `progressmeter.jl` library by adding functionality related to custom progress bar specifications ("barspec"). They implemented features to handle custom bar glyphs and incorporated test cases to validate these features. The user also addressed issues with keyword arguments and map/pmap integration, fixing bugs and expanding the library's capabilities for parallel processing.
progress-metermeterlong
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