Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

My 5th and 6th undergraduate internships were spent at Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab, a research lab focused on AI. For both terms, I was with the autonomous vehicle perception research team. My first term with the team was spent working on advancing LiDAR object detection on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets. I worked with both PyTorch and TensorFlow to design and implement experiments for improving 3D detection performance. The architectures I was working with were similar to seminal architectures in LiDAR object detection, namely SECOND and PointPillars. While working on LiDAR object detection, I developed a few tools to aid the other researchers in analyzing their model predictions. I wrote a tool to visualize 3D object detection predictions on the KITTI dataset using Python with NumPy and VTK. I then wrote a Python tool to calculate useful statistics from the model predictions on different 3D object detection datasets. During my second term with the team, I led the development of a web app used for semantic labeling of LiDAR point clouds. This web app allows users to load in point clouds from a dataset, and then manually assign semantic class labels to each point in the point cloud by moving around and using painting tools in 3D space. This application was primarily built using JavaScript with Three.js. Overall, these two terms offered many challenges, but were definitely rewarding in the end. It was my first time working on state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle research, and I learned a lot about the space. My second term was also quite a challenge, since I had never used JavaScript or worked on any web apps before. However, this made the term even more rewarding in the end, since I was forced to adapt and learn a brand new skill.