Swarn Avinash Kumar: A journey from small town boy to building self-driving cars

Swarn Avinash Kumar is a young innovator with a special skillset which he has acquired through a journey filled with ups and downs. With a passion for sports, this engineer turned mentor became one of the top researchers in the autonomous vehicle industry.

While Avinash was able to make his name in the competitive field of machine learning in his early 20s, it was easier said than done. Accumulating all those accomplishments wasn’t an easy task. However, there wasn’t any challenge that could deter him from his path which led to great heights. As they say, when life gives you lemons, make a lemonade. And, this is exactly what he did.

What separates Swarn Avinash from most people is his constant desire to push himself against all the odds. Swarn Avinash Kumar was born in the small town of Bihar. His parents Dr. Krishna Kumari Singh and Mr. Ashok Kumar Singh have raised him in different cities of Bihar and West Bengal.

While Avinash was always exceptional in studies, he scored 99 percentile marks in both the 10th and 12th board examinations, which is no less feat. After completing his schooling, he appeared for competitive exams of IIT-JEE and AIEEE. With the help of a healthy combination of hard and smart work, he managed to secure a seat in IIIT Allahabad. It is worth noting that IIIT Allahabad is one of India’s top five colleges to study computer science.

Avinash always found himself fascinated by the gaming industry and the idea behind it. He started programming early, which provided him with his robust base for all the later learning experiences. He dominated the majority of the programming competitions, such as TopCoder, CodeChef, and ACM-ICPC where he earned an impressive amount of money through cash prizes.

He utilized that prize money to pay loans and start his own company with his batchmates. While the money won from the competitions was not enough, he took a loan for his company.

Sadly, he had to shut down the company because of a lack of traction. Because of the loan he took, he desperately started looking for a job during the last semester of this college. He started working for APIGEE which is a subsidiary of the Google cloud platform as an intern.

In 2015, he joined Google’s APIGEE team as a software engineer. He honed his engineering skills thereby working on backend products. Soon, Avinash felt that his career and technological growth were limited because of the size of the company, in-house toolings, and processes. While he was acquiring new skills and developing as an engineer, those skills had limited application outside of the company.

This is when Avinash felt that he could get more hands-on experience working for smaller start-ups and grow stronger technically. He worked at different unicorn start-ups such as Housing.com in Mumbai and Ninjavan in Singapore.

He moved to Singapore as a founding engineer and learned how to build up a start-up from scratch. While Avinash joined Ninjavan at its nascent stage as the 20th engineer, he watched it grow to become a 200-engineer organization.

Avinash spent several sleepless nights because of the dues, and half of his salary went to paying loans. During that time, he came to know about an exciting new field of research on Machine Learning.

However, working as a machine learning engineer was tough because he did not have a Ph.D which was an important requirement of the industry. To overcome this, he studied in his spare time and honed his craft. He utilized the experience and knowledge he gained at several contests to master and test his skills.

But as they say, calm waters never made skillful swimmers. He also faced a few setbacks in his life when he could not convert his on-site interview at Facebook, Paris. However, he remained determined and cracked the interview for Amazon’s Computer Vision Team at its Core Machine Org in Berlin, Germany. He learned from the best like Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael Black and grew his Machine Learning skills.

Avinash soon felt that Amazon’s research organization was not providing the excitement and challenge he was after. So, he started to explore more exciting fields such as applied Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence.

He applied to different companies that he felt fit his requirement. He gave his best and converted jobs at three of those giant multinationals. Choosing from the options he had, he decided to join Lyft’s Self Driving organization Level5 in Munich.

Lyft, at the time, was experimenting with the exciting and promising field of self-driving cars. These Self Driving Cars are one of the biggest applications of advanced artificial intelligence in the 21st century.

At Lyft, he extensively used his prior technical skills and knowledge to file multiple patents and made several research contributions. He even contributed to Google’s Cartographer project currently being used by Lyft, Google StreetView, NASA, Toyota Research, and Bosch. Currently he is writing a book about the usage of AI in healthcare which will be published by Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK.

The cartographer project is a system that can provide real-time simultaneous localization and mapping in 3D and 2D across multiple platforms. It is extensively used for mapping building interiors and getting real-time mapping and loop closure at 5cm resolution.

Lyft is a ride-sharing company that operates in the United States and a few cities in Canada. All taxis and ride-sharing vehicles are driven by human drivers that can potentially be augmented by self-driving cars. It is an exciting concept, and all big ride-sharing companies are experimenting with it.

In 2019 Avinash Kumar moved to the USA and is currently living in San Francisco, CA. He now helps new start-ups by mentoring them using his vast experience and knowledge, which he has accumulated over the first-hand experience. He is presently associated with incubators and accelerators like TechStars, Founders Institute, MAccelerator, and Alchemist Accelerator.

While this journey from a small b-town to building self-driving cars in Silicon Valley was far from a walk in the park, the different skills that he accumulated over time greatly helped him. At the time, it wasn’t very clear where his journey would take him. But now, when you connect the dots, his journey has been nothing short of exciting at the very least.

To know more about Avinash Kumar, follow him on Linkedin.

Disclaimer: This is a company press release. No HT journalist was involved in the creation of this content.

Source: www.hindustantimes.com