Rahul Sukthankar

I'm a VP at Google Research, where I co-lead the Perception org. Our research advances the state of the art in AI and computer vision, with impact both on the external research community and internal critical product engagements. Our tech powers a large set Alphabet/Google products, including Cloud, Nest, Pixel, Photos, Search, Waymo and YouTube. Until recently, I was active in the academic research community, co-advising PhD students at Carnegie Mellon and UCF, and collaborating on open-source research and organizing conferences,

I went to school in several interesting countries (e.g., Senegal and Papua New Guinea) before coming to the U.S. My undergraduate research was in neural networks and robotics in the late 1980s, before we had the compute or data resources to solve any hard real-world problems. My graduate work was on autonomous vehicles in the 1990s, before self-driving cars became popular. I've also had the good fortune to work with awesome colleagues at a number of exciting computer science research labs; sadly all of those labs have died.

Outside work, my wife and I enjoy scuba diving with sharks, playing D&D and practicing martial arts.