---
title: "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.

# 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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping) 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.

![Lidar point cloud.](lidar3.png)

- **2025--present**: [NVIDIA DRIVE](https://developer.nvidia.com/drive) IC5
- **2023--2025**: [Main Street Autonomy](https://mainstreetautonomy.com) Startup software engineer
- **2021--2023**: [Tesla](https://tesla.com/) Senior software engineer, Autopilot
- **2020--2021**: [Tempus Ex Machina](https://tempus-ex.com/) Staff software engineer, computer vision
- **2016--2020**: [Ouster](https://ouster.io/) Software engineer, mapping

:: resume /resume.pdf

# Education

- **2014--2016**: [Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. Robotics](https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ri_static_content.html?menu_id=469)
- **2008--2014**: [University of British Columbia, B.A.Sc. Eng. Phys.](https://www.engphys.ubc.ca/)

At CMU, my advisor was [George Kantor](https://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=717).
I worked on [SLAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping) using a combination of cameras and a lidar, for an autonomous off-road vehicle.

My thesis is called [Vision-Enhanced Lidar Odometry and Mapping](/public/thesis.pdf). 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.

# 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.

:: email mailto:daniel@lawrence.lu

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](https://github.com/dllu) |
| x | [x.com/dllu](https://x.com/dllu) |
| wikipedia | [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:dllu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:dllu) |
| hacker news | [news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dllu](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dllu) |
| reddit | [reddit.com/u/dllu](https://reddit.com/u/dllu) |

Table: Links to my account on various websites.

# Publications

## 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](https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipl.2015.07.004), [arXiv:1412.6619](https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6619)

## Preprints

- **Daniel Lu**. (2015) Generalization of elementary cellular automata to a higher dimension family including the BML traffic model. [arXiv:1501.00733](https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00733)
- Paul Liu and **Daniel Lu**. (2014) A fast 25/6-approximation for the minimum unit disk cover problem. [arXiv:1406.3838](https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3838)

## Technical reports

- **Daniel Lu**. (2016) Vision-Enhanced Lidar Odometry and Mapping. _Masters Thesis_. [pdf link](/public/thesis.pdf)
- **Daniel Lu**. (2015) Offline estimation of vehicular inertial parameters using onboard lidar. [webpage](/programming/inertial), [pdf link](https://lawrence.lu/public/report_16-711.pdf)
- **Daniel Lu**, Anson Liang, Richard Lee. (2012) Quaffle: Design of an Autonomous Quadrotor. [webpage](/engineering/quaffle/), [pdf link](https://lawrence.lu/public/quaffle.pdf)