Josh Veitch-Michaelis
I'm a computer vision engineer interested in instrumentation and applying machine learning for social good.
I am a postdoc in the Weecology group at the University of Florida working on computer vision for aerial image understanding. I’m a maintainer for DeepForest, and my main research focus is on improving the group’s object detection pipelines.
Previously, I was a postdoc jointly between the DS3Lab at ETH Zurich (Systems Group), supervised by Prof. Ce Zhang, and Restor Eco. My research was funded by a Google.org impact grant project to explore how best to apply ML to datasets that Restor has collected (imagery, audio data, LIDAR, etc.). This culminated in the release of OAM-TCD, a large dataset of very high resolution aerial images and labels for tree crown delineation. This dataset is one of the largest and most diverse of its kind, specifically constructed to facilitate low-cost, scaleable, global tree mapping. I’m was a member of the Insights team for BioDivX, a multi-institution group of researchers that competed in the Rainforest X Prize finals.
I have wintered twice for the US Antarctic Program at the South Pole. In 2021, for the University of Wisconsin, Madison for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and again 2024 for the University of Chicago, for the South Pole Telescope, a 10-m instrument observing echoes of the very early universe. For both experiments, I was one of a pair of on-call scientists responsible for maintaining the telescopes and the associated hardware and software infrastructure.
I’ve often been at the intersection of academia and industry. Some of the more interesting projects include: putting ML models in space to detect flooding, building intelligent drone payloads for endangered species conservation, maintaining the world’s largest neutrino telescope, designing 3D imaging systems for extreme environments and trying to automate spectral calibration for astronomers everywhere.
I obtained my PhD from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (University College London) in 2016, and awarded best thesis by the Remote Sensing and Photogrammatery Society. I was also awarded UCL’s SIM scholarship the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers for excellence in instrumentation research.
Me, taking pictures of the aurora australis in front of the South Pole Telescope late in winter 2024 - photo by my co-winterover Kevin Zagorski
