Ashok Kumar Elluswamy is an Indian-origin software engineer. He has been working with Tesla for more than eight years (as of 2021). Ashok is the first person on the self-driving team of Tesla, an American electric vehicle energy company.
Wiki/Biography
Ashok studied at College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Chennai, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering (2005-2009). He also holds a master’s degree in robotic systems development from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA (2012-2013).
appearance
Height (approximately): 5′7″
Hair color: black
Eye color: black
family
Parents and siblings
Not much is known about his parents and siblings.
wife and children
Ashok is married and has a daughter.
Ashok Elluswamy with wife and daughter
Ashok Elluswamy and his daughter
Profession
Ashok started his career in 2010 with WABCO Vehicle Control Systems, a US-based supplier of electronic braking, stability, suspension and transmission automation systems for heavy commercial vehicles in Chennai, Tamil Nadu ), working as a software engineer. At WABCO, he worked on brake actuator modules to establish real-time performance guarantees for actuators. Ashok is also working on the development and validation of on-board and off-board diagnostic software for vehicle electronic control units. He worked there until 2012, then joined the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory in Belmont, California as a research intern.
Belmont Volkswagen Automotive Electronics Research Laboratory
In 2014, Elluswamy joined the American electric vehicle energy company “Tesla” as a software engineer in its autonomous driving department. In June 2016, he was promoted to the company’s senior software engineer. He was subsequently promoted to Senior Software Engineer. In 2019, Ashok was appointed director of Tesla’s autonomous driving department. As Director of Autopilot, Ashok oversees autonomous software teams and the creation of large-scale automated ground truth pipelines to train neural networks using large amounts of diverse, high-quality data. Elluswamy is also responsible for developing accurate, detailed geometric and semantic understanding of the world using the best machine learning and engineering models.
Tesla
Facts/Trivia
- Ashok is fluent in four languages - Hindi, English, Tamil and Telugu.
- John Dolan, Aileswamy’s teacher at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in praise of Ashok on his LinkedIn account:
Ashok was one of my top students in my master’s program in Robotics Systems Development Program at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012-13. He has shown excellent initiative in learning various topics useful for his explosive ordnance disposal robot project, particularly stereo vision, motion planning, and the various software packages required for implementation. Ashok is constantly learning, full of energy and motivation. “
- In 2021, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk revealed via Twitter that Ashok was the first employee hired by his electric car company’s autonomous driving team. He said,
I tweeted that Tesla was about to launch an autonomous driving team. With that tweet, Ashok became the first person to be selected for the autonomous driving team. “
He further said,
Ashok is actually the head of the Autopilot project. ”
- As of 2021, he resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education