Ali Younis
ayounis (at) uci (dot) edu
ABOUT
Hello! I’m currently a Senior Computer Vision & Machine Learning Engineer at OpenSpace.ai where I build cool 3D perception systems to help make construction more efficient. In general I am interested in computer vision based perception for 3D real world understanding using a range of sensors, particularly in unstructured environments or for robotics applications.
I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, advised by Professor Erik Sudderth. My research mainly focused on understanding the world from camera data. More specifically I used particle based particle based non-parametric belief propagation methods to solve hard computer vision tasks in time varying systems. Example applications of my work include localization, human mesh reconstruction, 3D vision and robotics (as well as a bunch of other computer vision perception tasks).
Previously, I worked as a software engineer at Modal AI, a software engineer at Tyvak (now Terran Orbital) and as an intern at Qualcomm. I received an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, Irvine.
PhD Thesis
End-to-end Differentiable Learning of Particle Belief Propagation Algorithms
Ali Younis
Doctoral Thesis, University of California, Irvine. June 2025
Thesis
PUBLICATIONS
Learning to be Smooth: An End-to-End Differentiable Particle Smoother
Ali Younis, Erik B. Sudderth
Neural Information Processing Systems (Neurips), 2024
Paper · Poster · Video · Project Page · Code
Differentiable and Stable Long-Range Tracking of Multiple Posterior Modes
Ali Younis, Erik B. Sudderth
Neural Information Processing Systems (Neurips), 2023
Paper · Poster · Video · Code
A Decoder Suffices for Query-Adaptive Variational Inference
Sakshi Agarwal, Gabriel Hope, Ali Younis, Erik B. Sudderth
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2023
Abstract · Paper · Supplement · Poster · Video
Vigilia: Securing Smart Home Edge Computing
Rahmadi Trimananda, Ali Younis, Bojun Wang, Bin Xu, Brian Demsky, Guoqing Xu
IEEE ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), 2018
Paper
POSTERS
Securing Smart Home Devices against Compromised Cloud Servers
Rahmadi Trimananda, Ali Younis, Thomas Kwa, Brian Demsky
USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing (HotEdge), 2020
Paper · Poster