About Me

(in about 1500 words)

Intro

I'm an engineer with a passion for food, travelling, and improving people's lives through technology. I graduated with an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a BASc. in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Waterloo. My interests lie at the intersection of AI and Robotics, with a focus on Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning. I have an array of industry and research experience, having worked at large companies (like Walt Disney Imagineering and IBM), start-ups (like Dragonfruit AI), and research labs (like CLVR). I am currently a Machine Learning Scientist at Signal 1, leveraging AI to improve hospital care.

Some history

  • Born in Jakarta, Indonesia on July 30, 1997.
  • Got my black belt in Taekwondo in mid 2008.
  • Moved to Toronto, Canada in August of 2008.
  • I got my first job in the 7th grade. I worked as a Legislative Page at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
  • Discovered my passion for engineering when I took a woodshop course in the 9th grade. I built an iPhone 3G projector out of wood and a couple of glass lenses.
  • I got my first tech job at a local robotics startup, in my Junior year of high school. I built a reprap robot that "printed" out funnel cake batter, using an Arduino and 3D printed parts.
  • Enrolled in the University of Waterloo, majoring in Mechatronics Engineering, in the Fall of 2015.
  • Went on exchange and studied Engineering Product Development at the Singapore University of Technology and Design for the Winter 2019 semester. Took the opportunity to travel to Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and back home to Indonesia.
  • Fulfilled a childhood dream when I interned at Walt Disney Imagineering in the Summer of 2019, where I contributed Moana's Journey of Water opening in EPCOT late 2023. It was the sixth and final internship of my undergrad.
  • Graduated from the University of Waterloo in July of 2020. Presented our Capstone Project: an intelligent water monitoring system called Lilypod.
  • Published a paper, A deep learning approach to the screening of malaria infection: Automated and rapid cell counting, object detection and instance segmentation using Mask R-CNN, in Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics in December of 2020.
  • Enrolled in the University of Southern California, pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science, in the Fall of 2020.
  • Took a Leave of Absence due to the pandemic's interruption of in-person classes.
  • Worked a couple of remote internships.
  • Moved to Los Angeles for school in the Fall of 2021.
  • Joined CLVR in November of 2021.
  • Went back to Disney Research for a second internship in the Summer of 2022. It was just as magical the second time around!
  • Started a part-time position at Signal 1 as a Machine Learning Scientist in February of 2023
  • Submitted to RSS and released the CLVR Jaco Play Dataset in April of 2023, which was later used in Open X-Embodiment.
  • Graduated from USC with an M.S. in Computer Science and initiated into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society in May of 2023. Went on an amazing graduation trip to Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia.
  • Started full-time at Signal 1 as a Machine Learning Scientist in July of 2023. Excited to be making a difference in healthcare through the use of AI.

I like

  • Cooking (and eating)
  • Badminton
  • Chess
  • Guitar
  • Poetry
  • Binging sitcoms
  • Singing karaoke with friends

According to others

Jullian is the brightest young engineer I've ever had the pleasure of working with (I would usually add a "one of the" descriptor to a statement like this, but decided that this was not warranted in his case). He has only begun work on his masters program, but already he knows more about software development than many senior engineers who have been in the industry for a long time. On top of this, he has a very conscientious work ethic, and produces prolifically. During his short 7 month internship at Dragonfruit, he built from the ground up a key new product that extended our existing offering in an entirely new dimension, and which involved exploration, research, development (on multiple OSs), integration, deployment, and working with customers. Thanks to his efforts, we were able to get this new product out into the field in record time. Before he completed his internship he made a 40+ page document of his work so others could continue building and supporting the product. Bravo! I suspect Jullian is destined for great things.

Jullian spent a few months with our team and worked on an absolutely new feature set. He was unfazed by the challenging task and went about it in a very autonomous manner. The field of on-prem AI solutions is new and requires a great deal of original thinking and perseverance to be able to actualize a production worthy solution. Jullian was able to deliver very convincingly on this. His work was thorough and he delivered very high quality output. It was a pleasure to work with Jullian and I wish him the very best for this future.

  • Jeremie Papon, R&D Imagineering Principal, Disney Research (2019)

Jullian was an outstanding worker, who regularly sought and came up with innovative solutions to complex problems. When needed, he would seek out and learn new disciplines on his own to solve these problems, including teaching himself areas of deep learning for which there were no in-house experts to mentor him. Jullian also showed exceptional initiative by indentifying areas of need, proposing new project ideas, and executing on them. Jullian was a fantastic intern, one of the best I've had. He learned how to use our internal system very quickly, and began making improvements to it almost immediately.

Jullian is the kind of person that looks at a massive task with an impossible deadline and smiles. I came to understand that he smiles because he knows he can get it done and may have already worked out a possible approach vector. It was a pleasure to work with Jullian in the past 4 months at IBM where he worked on and delivered leading-edge projects with minimal prior expertise, prior documentation, and minimal guidance. For the project that I managed, Julllian demonstrated excellent capabilities in machine learning, visual recognition, robotics, and software development. Whenever Jullian is challenged to think bigger and broader, he rises to the challenge and adds his own bit of detail/insight to exceed expectations. In addition to having a strong drive to learn and explore, he takes full ownership of tasks (which has sometimes involved working into the AM) and remains committed well beyond the critical point to ensure maintainability and growth of the project. I would absolutely recommend Jullian to anyone that may be considering him.

I have met only a few people with as much initiative, curiosity, and persistence as Jullian. During his time as a co-op at ZGL, I had the pleasure of seeing him and his team build a couple of projects from scratch, including a serverless mobile application and an in-store AR game. Jullian was always willing to teach his team members what he had learned and was skilled at doing so. I miss our chess games together, especially his clever strategies. Overall, I think any place would be lucky to have someone like Jullian as a member.

  • Abhijit Sinha, Director (Aerospace & Defence), A.U.G. Signals (2017)

Mr. Jullian A. Yapeter has shown a great interest in his work at A.U.G. Signals Ltd (AUG). He actively approached me (his supervisor) to fill up the gaps including while running computational intensive processing. Mr. Yapeter has shown excellent ability to quickly learn algorithms, e.g. image resampling and data interpolation, and software languages (e.g. Matlab). The quality of work he delivered to the company was outstanding. During the term, Mr. Yapeter has produced large volume of work, including development of algorithms (e.g. for data interpolation and image resampling); performing literature review (e.g. understanding Biologische Bundesanstalt, Bundessortenamt und CHemische Industrie (BBCH) scale for canola crop); software development and testing (e.g. for automation of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) parameter extraction and image othro-rectification); and data processing (e.g. SAR and electro-optical imagery preprocessing and parameter extraction). He has shown a great ability in solving algorithm development and software coding challenges. During his work at AUG, Mr. Yapeter has been very dependable, even when the deadlines were very tight. He was a valuable asset to the team by accommodating team’s needs. He has been very responsive to supervision, even when it required adapting his work. He always met the deadlines for all the tasks. AUG provided a diverse working environment within which Mr. Yapeter was always been very comfortable. He has taken a keen interest to understand how the task assigned to him helps AUG’s goals and provided useful feedback on a number of occasions. Mr. Yapeter has shown excellent written and oral communication skills on every occasion available.