jaybdub

Hi, my name's John! This website has some projects I've worked on and thoughts I've had.

I love seeing what others are working on and chatting about ideas. Feel free to reach out if you want to connect.

Projects

JetBot


JetBot is a project I worked on with a couple colleagues at NVIDIA. It's a small, affordable, and easy to use robot... the robot I wish I had in college.

We built some fun examples using machine learning to demonstrate what's possible, and the community has largely taken it from there. We're quite proud of it, and love to see what others have done with it.

JetRacer



JetRacer is basically JetBot... on a racecar. After releasing JetBot, we gave a presentation at a DIY robocars race event in Oakland. A couple weeks before the race event we asked ourselves "Wouldn't it be fun to put JetBot on one of these?". Fortunately, my colleague had already designed a DIY racecar previosuly. A few tweaks to the hardware, load up the software, and we were up and running in no time. With nearly identical software to JetBot we were able to place first in the "stock" category of the DIY robocar race!

trt_pose



trt_pose is a human pose estimation algorithm that I developed at NVIDIA. It runs pretty fast and enables some fun applications on NVIDIA Jetson. At it's core, it's essentially the neural network architecture from one paper, combined with the meta-architecture of another paper, combined with and a ton of training, tweaking, and re-training.

torch2trt



torch2trt is a tool which converts PyTorch models to TensorRT. Originally, I didn't think this project would grow as big as it has, but it's proven helpful for various workflows. It's growth is largely from numerous community submitted issues and pull requests to GitHub. I've learned a lot about open-source software from this project.

Favorite quotes

“Poor minds talk about people. Average minds talk about events. Great minds talk about ideas.” - Eleanor Roosevelt.

This was written on a poster in my high-school English class. It resonated with me at the time and has stuck with me since.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

I think I saw this quote in high school physics. I try to remember this whenever I'm solving a problem or scoping a project. For me this quote manifests itself as something like,
"The code you delete is more valuable than the code you write." - John.
But I'm not sure I'd get hired to just delete code, and I might have actually ripped that quote from somewhere. So maybe something like,
"Your neural network doesn't need more layers, but better layers!" - John
But sometimes more layers just helps. So maybe something like
"Your data's probably just bad." - John.
Yes, that's it. Courage and genius.

But genuinely, I love this (Einstein's) quote.