CHRISTOPHER DENNISTON
ABOUT
Personal Profile
University of Southern California Ph.D. Student with a focus on robotics and estimation. Working on studying algal blooms using underwater vehicles and drones together.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
September 2017 - Present
RESEARCH ASSISTANT, USC - ROBOTICS EMBEDDED SYSTEMS LAB
Performed research on multi robot systems for environmental monitoring as part of thesis research under Dr. Gaurav Sukhatme. Lead teams of students to work on various software and hardware tasks associated with research. Students gained valuable skills working on real world robotic research problems.
July 2020 - Present
RESEARCH COLLABORATOR, NASA/JPL
Performed research and implementation on SLAM systems for localizing multi-robot systems in challenging cave and tunnel environments.
May 2018 - August 2018
MACHINE LEARNING GRADUATE INTERN, MITRE
Performed research on hydrophone data for marine mammal classification using neural networks. This data was processed using custom neural network architectures and allowed for the identification of different mammal types.
Researched and developed a system to classify objects from satellite imagery with limited training data. The impact of synthetic training data was also investigated.
September 2015 - June 2017
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, PAYIT INC
Worked to grow company from small operation of seven employees to large operation of 50 plus employees. The startup is currently revenue positive and growing rapidly. Developed and maintained micro-service back-end components to support front-end components. Many of these software components that I designed and developed are still used heavily in the system today.
EDUCATION
May 2019 - Present
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Computer Science, Robotics
June 2017 - May 2019
MASTERS OF SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Computer Science (Data Science)
May 2013 - December 2016
BACHELORS OF SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI - KANSAS CITY
Computer Science