CV
Education
- B.Tech. in Electronics and Communications Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering (Coimbatore, India), 2014
- Senior Thesis: Digitization of linearized thermistor output using dual slope Analog to Digital Converter
- M.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of Washington - Seattle, 2017
- Dissertation: Isosurface visualization using augmented reality for improving tumor resection outcomes
- Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington - Seattle, 2021 (expected)
Work experience
- March 2017 - Present : Research Assistant
- BioRobotics Lab, University of Washington
- Advisor: Professor Blake Hannaford, Dr. Laligam Sekhar
- October, 2019 - Present: Teaching Assistant
- PRO Unlimited at Apple
- Manager: Karla Vega, Jo Arreaza-Taylor
- June, 2019 - September, 2019: Machine Learning Intern
- Apple (Seattle, WA)
- Manager: Krishna Sridhar, Nick Jong
- June, 2018 - September, 2018: Research Intern
- NVIDIA Research (Durham, North Carolina)
- Manager: David Luebke, Josef Spjut
- January, 2016 - March, 2017: Graduate Student Researcher
- BioRobotics Lab, University of Washington
- Manager: Professor Blake Hannaford, Dr. Kris Moe
- June, 2014 - September, 2015: Project Associate
- Robotics Lab, Indian Institute of Technology - Madras
- Manager: Professor Asokan Thondiyath
Skills
Languages (Fluent): Python, C++, C#, MATLAB, Git, C, LaTeX, Mathematica
Languages (Familiar): CUDA, Node.js, CSS, HTML, Java, Assembly
Frameworks and tools: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Robot Operating System (ROS), Gazebo, RViz, MuJoCo Unity3D, OpenGL, Docker, Unreal Engine, Maya3D, Blender, SolidWorks, Photoshop, Illustrator
Fabrication: 3D printing, laser cutting, PCB etching
Publications
Niveditha Kalavakonda, Sourav Chandra, and Asokan Thondiyath. 2015. Development of virtual reality based robotic surgical trainer for patient-specific deformable anatomy. 2015 Conference on Advances In Robotics (AIR ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 16, 1–5. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2783449.2783465
Pattery, John Jose, Niveditha Kalavakonda, Jitu Verghese Kurian, Lekha Mohan, Jippu Jacob. "Design and Development of Robot for Borewell Rescue", Proceedings of the 14th IFToMM World Congress ; 2015 Oct 25-30; Taipei, Taiwan. doi:10.6567/IFToMM.14TH.WC.OS13.103
K. Lindgren, N. Kalavakonda, D. E. Caballero, K. Huang and B. Hannaford, "Learned Hand Gesture Classification Through Synthetically Generated Training Samples," 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) , Madrid, 2018, pp. 3937-3942. doi: 10.1109/IROS.2018.8593433
Allan, M., Shvets, A., Kurmann, T., Zhang, Z., Duggal, R., Su, Y., Rieke, N., Laina, I., Kalavakonda, N., Bodenstedt, S., García-Peraza, L.C., Li, W., Iglovikov, V.I., Luo, H., Yang, J., Stoyanov, D., Maier-Hein, L., Speidel, S., & Azizian, M. (2019). 2017 Robotic Instrument Segmentation Challenge. ArXiv, abs/1902.06426.
N. Kalavakonda, L. Sekhar and B. Hannaford, "Augmented Reality Application for Aiding Tumor Resection in Skull-Base Surgery," 2019 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2019, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/ISMR.2019.8710203
Kalavakonda, Niveditha, Zeeshan Qazi, Laligam Sekhar, Blake Hannaford. "Neurosurgical and Robotic Instrument Segmentation using Convolutional Neural Networks". Workshop Proceedings in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) ; 2019 June 16-20; Long Beach, California.
Teaching
Service and leadership
Reviewer for Machine Learning and Robotics Tracks in Conferences (IROS 2019, NeurIPS 2019, Grace Hopper Celebration 2018/9, Hopperx1 Seattle 2017/9, ICRA 2020)
- Volunteer Projects, Women in Tech communities – Seattle (2016-Present)
- Member of Education team for Women in Data Science Seattle, responsible for organizing study groups, speed mentoring, workshop series, and book clubs
- Mentor for TensorFlow and Computer Vision events at Google Developer Group Seattle
- Committee member for Career Fair and Sponsorship committee at HopperX1 Seattle 2017 and 2019 and AI committee member for Grace Hopper Celebration 2019 and 2020
- Meet a Scientist, Girls Night Out and Tinker Tank volunteer at Pacific Science Center
- Founding Member, Student Advisory Council – Electrical Engineering, University of Washington (2019– Present)
- Founding Chair, Women in Engineering – Electrical Engineering, University of Washington (2017– Present)
- Regional Student Representative, Region 1-7 – IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2017 – Present)
- Robotics Workshop Leader, ChickTech - Seattle (2016 –2019)
- Officer, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – University of Washington-Seattle (2015 – 2018)
- Regional Graduate Representative, Region J, GradSWE – Society of Women Engineers (2016 – 2018)
- Officer, Graduate Student Association – University of Washington - Seattle (2015 – 2017)
