Anurag Paul joined Plus as a Sr. Research Engineer in 2020 after interning with the company during graduate school. He was promoted to Staff Research Engineer in 2023. He studied Industrial Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee. He previously worked as a Sr. Data Scientist before completing his Master’s Degree in Machine Learning from U.C. San Diego.
What drew you to the autonomous vehicle industry?
I have always been driven to solve complex problems which can have significant impact. Working in the autonomous vehicle industry gives one a chance to be at the forefront of technological innovation. It presents unique challenges to build efficient and safe driving systems that can improve the lives of people all over the world.
Tell us about your role at Plus.
My role is focused on solving Perception related objectives of autonomous driving by leveraging deep learning models. This involves designing data pipelines, model architectures, training processes and finally optimizing the model for deployment on edge devices.
What challenges keep you passionate about your work with deep learning?
One of the unique features of AI and deep learning is that the technological landscape keeps changing every few months. Techniques that are popular today can become obsolete within 1 or 2 years.
Paul highlights his work on 360-degree surround vision using a multi-camera Bird’s-Eye-View model as the centerpiece of PlusVision. “Working on this model is highly challenging as it involves processing images from several cameras using CNNs, projecting features into BEV space and processing them using transformers.”
What has been your proudest moment at Plus?
Developing a unified system for multi-task training of obstacle models…I was able to train a model to handle multiple tasks and multiple datasets. This allowed us to merge the capabilities of tens of models into a single model, making our operations more efficient.
What has kept you at Plus for over four years?
There is a remarkable degree of freedom in terms of innovation…Innovation does not thrive in isolation.
How do you spend your downtime?
My wife and I like to travel and hike. I also play board games such as Catan and Splendor. At the office, I love to play table tennis.