Lab

Appearance

Principal Investigator ​

Dr. Sanjeev Koppal ​

Dr. Sanjeev Koppal

Dr. Sanjeev Koppal

Sanjeev J. Koppal is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and is a Kent and Linda Fuchs Faculty Fellow. He also held a UF Term Professorship for 2021-23. Sanjeev is the Director of the FOCUS Lab at UF. Since 2022, Sanjeev has been an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Robotics. Prior to joining UF, he was a researcher at the Texas Instruments Imaging R&D lab. Sanjeev obtained his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. After CMU, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Southern California in 2003 as a Trustee Scholar. He is a co-author on best student paper awards for ECCV 2016 and NEMS 2018, and work from his FOCUS lab was a CVPR 2019 best-paper finalist. Sanjeev won an NSF CAREER award in 2020 and is an IEEE Senior Member and an Optica Senior Member. His interests span computer vision, computational photography and optics, novel cameras and sensors, 3D reconstruction, physics-based vision, and active illumination.

352-392-8942 · MALA 5103

Ph.D Students ​

Hannah Kirkland ​

Hannah Kirkland

Hannah Kirkland

Hannah is a graduate research assistant in the FOCUS Lab. They graduated with a B.S in Electrical Engineering from UF in 2021. Their interests include computational photography, unconventional computing, and computer vision.

Yuxuan Zhang ​

Yuxuan Zhang

Yuxuan Zhang

Yuxuan is pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, after earning his Bachelor's in Physics from Xi'an Jiao Tong University. He builds end-to-end intelligent robotic systems spanning Machine Learning, Software, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering. His current research focuses on foveated vision systems, vergence stereo algorithms, and their applications in robotics.

Michael Tomadakis ​

Michael Tomadakis

Michael Tomadakis

Michael is a 2024 Computer Science graduate from the University of Florida. He's been passionate about graphics since discovering shaders in Unreal Engine 3 twelve years ago, but his interests have matured into Computer Vision and Neural Rendering. He is working on NeRF stitching and adjacent techniques.

Jacob Carter ​

Jacob Carter

Jacob Carter

Jacob graduated from Louisiana State University in 2024 with a B.S. in Computer Science. He is interested in AI, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision.

Thiago Cuevas ​

Thiago Cuevas

Thiago Cuevas

Thiago Cuevas holds a Bachelor’s degree in Control and Automation Engineering from the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Florida. Prior to joining the FOCUS Lab, he worked in research and development in Robotics, Computer Vision, and Embedded Systems, having experience in both software and hardware design. His current research focuses on collision prediction algorithms and computational imaging.

Undergraduate Students ​

Aryan Thakur ​

Aryan Thakur

Aryan Thakur

Aryan is a Computer Science undergraduate at UF. He works on the control stack and model training for an optical convolutional neural network accelerator. His interests include optical computing, high-speed hardware control, and machine learning.

Ajna Topic ​

Ajna Topic

Ajna Topic

Ajna is a Sophomore Computer Engineering Student at UF. She is interested in microcontrollers, robotics, and optics.

Noah Ralph ​

Noah Ralph

Noah Ralph

Noah Ralph is an undergraduate student at the University of Florida majoring in Electrical Engineering. His interests include 3D printing, Biomechanics, Robotics, and Medical Devices.

Dillon Gutowski ​

Dillon Gutowski

Dillon Gutowski

Dillon is an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of Florida. He is interested in algorithm design and applied mathematics, light transport simulation, embedded systems, dual photography, and Raman spectroscopy.

Logan Burns ​

Logan Burns

Logan Burns

Logan Burns is an undergraduate researcher in the FOCUS Lab, majoring in Electrical Engineering at the University of Florida. She builds thermal instrumentation for embedded computing hardware, and is second author on a manuscript on thermal-adaptive continual learning currently in revision. Her own work predicts the temperatures of board components that carry no sensors, from on-die telemetry alone, and reconstructs a board's full thermal field with no camera in the loop. Her interests are analog and mixed-signal circuits, instrumentation and measurement, and optical sensing.

Alumni ​

Doctoral Students ​

  • Justin Folden

    Thesis: Foveated Depth Sensing (2024)

  • Brevin Tilmon - Quidient

    Thesis: Foveated Computational Imaging (2023)

  • Xiaomeng Liu

    Thesis: Lightweight Light Transport for Non-line-of-sight Imaging (2022)

  • Dingkang Wang – Texas Instruments

    Thesis: Quasi-static Scanning and Monolithic Forward Scanning Electrothermal MEMS Mirrors for LIDAR (2021)

  • Kristofer Henderson – Lockheed Martin

    Thesis: Sensor Fusion for Non-Line-of-Sight Visualization and Imaging (2020)

  • Francesco Pittaluga – NEC Labs

    Thesis: Privacy Preserving Computational Cameras (2019)

  • Xiaoyang Zhang (PhD co-advised with Dr. Huikai Xie) – Apple

    Thesis: Robust Electrothermally Actuated Scanner for Fiberoptic Endoscopic Imaging and Wide-angle Optics (2016)

Master’s and Undergraduate Students ​

Class of 2026 ​

  • Trung Le (BS) - PhD candidate at University of Southern California
  • Rebecca Borissova (BS) - Apple

Class of 2025 ​

  • Piper Taylor (BS) - Scientist at Eglin AFB

Class of 2024 ​

  • Jackson Arnold (MS)
  • Chloe Petrosino (BS) - PhD candidate at Duke University

Class of 2023 ​

  • Lianan Armil (BS)
  • Dylan Ogrodowski (BS) – MS student at University of Florida

Class of 2022 ​

  • Sophia Rossi (BS) – Microsoft
  • Nicolas Laffineuse (BS) – Texas Instruments
  • Gavin St. John (BS)

Class of 2021 ​

  • TJ Thomas (BS) – PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University

Class of 2018 ​

  • Zaid Tasneem (MS) – PhD candidate at Rice University

Class of 2017 ​

  • Nahien Chowdhury (BS) – The Boeing Company
  • Tatiana Luna (BS) – MS/PhD candidate at Columbia University
  • Aashik Nagadikeri Harish (MS) – STRIVR Labs

Class of 2016 ​

  • Aleksandar Zivkovic (MS) – Magic and Company
  • Junior Metayer (BS) – Florida Power and Light
  • Phillip Riley (MS) – Harris Corporation
  • Ishwarya Iyengar Thirunarayanan (MS) – Siemens Imaging

Class of 2015 ​

  • Elizabeth Butler (MS) – Lockheed Martin