About
The short history of my life is: I was born in Singapore, then moved to Vancouver, BC, Canada at the age of 11, then I moved to the US for grad school (Pittsburgh, PA) and work (San Francisco bay area, CA). My parents are both Shanghainese; they moved from Shanghai to the US for grad school, then to Singapore for work, and now they reside in Canada.
1 Work
I work in what’s called Spatial AI nowadays. Basically, I have a decade of experience in making sense of the 3D world via simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with lidar, cameras, and other sensors, and more recently, stuff like Gaussian splatting. I currently work at NVIDIA on their self driving car project, on context fusion.

FIGURE 1 Lidar point cloud.
- 2025–present: NVIDIA DRIVE IC5
- 2023–2025: Main Street Autonomy Startup software engineer
- 2021–2023: Tesla Senior software engineer, Autopilot
- 2020–2021: Tempus Ex Machina Staff software engineer, computer vision
- 2016–2020: Ouster Software engineer, mapping
2 Education
- 2014–2016: Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. Robotics
- 2008–2014: University of British Columbia, B.A.Sc. Eng. Phys.
At CMU, my advisor was George Kantor. I worked on SLAM using a combination of cameras and a lidar, for an autonomous off-road vehicle.
My thesis is called Vision-Enhanced Lidar Odometry and Mapping. It is about combining several different SLAM algorithms, each with different strengths and weaknesses, so that a robot can function robustly in many different environments.
3 Contact
My email address is the same as my full name except with an ’@’ in between my first and middle names and a dot between my middle and last name.
On many websites I have the username dllu
except some websites where I was too late and the four letter username was already taken.
website | link |
---|---|
github | github.com/dllu |
x | x.com/dllu |
wikipedia | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:dllu |
hacker news | news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dllu |
reddit.com/u/dllu |
4 Publications
4.1 Journal papers
- Daniel Lu. (2015) Planar lower envelope of monotone polygonal chains. Information Processing Letters, 115(12), 962-964. doi:10.1016/j.ipl.2015.07.004, arXiv:1412.6619
4.2 Preprints
- Daniel Lu. (2015) Generalization of elementary cellular automata to a higher dimension family including the BML traffic model. arXiv:1501.00733
- Paul Liu and Daniel Lu. (2014) A fast 25/6-approximation for the minimum unit disk cover problem. arXiv:1406.3838