Collin Otis

Collin Otis has a long and varied work experience. Collin began their career in 2006 as a Research Engineer at Eaton, where they worked on algorithms for remote arc-fault recognition in industrial power transmission systems. In 2007, they took a role as a Simulation Engineer at Apogee Technology, Inc. In 2008, they became a Predoctoral Research Fellow at NASA. In 2011, they moved to the Air Force Research Laboratory as a Computational Research Scientist. In 2012, they founded and became CEO of Powered Analytics, a mobile microlocation ad platform on iOS for indoor retail ad-targeting using multi-channel purchase and browsing data. In 2014, they co-founded and led Target's Pittsburgh ML Office, where they built scalable distributed fault-tolerant machine learning services on top of Target's data. In 2017, they joined Uber as Chief of Staff, ATG Software, where they led autonomy commercialization for robotaxis. In 2018, they joined Kodiak Robotics as Head of Perception and Founding Sr. Staff Software Engineer, where they built and led teams and contributed to many parts of the stack.

Collin Otis has completed a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as graduate coursework in Machine Learning, Statistics, Business, and Math from Carnegie Mellon University. Collin also holds an MS and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh.