Self Driving Cars

In November 2019, I enrolled myself in Udacity's much talked about Self Driving Engineer Nanodegree Program, aiming to learn from the experts the tech behind autonomous vehicles.

It's still WIP as it is a 6 months program, but I think I should be able to complete in 2 months, given that I have already touched upon a lot of the topics while working at Playment. Stay tuned for updates on the projects I complete.

I have also come to realise that, one cannot become a Self Driving Car Engineer, if he/she has not got their hands dirty on training models using open-source datasets or custom datasets. All thanks to Google, I used Colab to full capacity to train two of my own models.

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Hivemind

Hivemind is the first of my side projects.

Having worked at Playment and given a chance to interact with machine learning experts & deep learning enthusiasts, I realised that there are no proper tools to visualize open source annotation datasets before using it for training.

Figured this could be a problem to solve for, I started working on a product with the minimal capacity I could find.


If you are a Machine Learning Engineer or a Data Scientist, I would love to get your feedback on this.

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Playment

Playment is an early stage startup building the infrastructure to provide high quality training data for computer vision systems. It helps companies and startups working in autonomous driving space accelerate their AI development process.

Being a PM, I went in early into the process by helping customers understand Playment's range of products & services and consulting them on how to move forward with training their computer vision models.

At Playment, it being a start-up, one also gets to wear multiple hats if they have got the right skills and hence I also head the product solutions team; helping project managers develop the right solutions for their projects. The pace at which the team deployed solutions at the time, makes me feel really proud of the team and I wish for their bright future always.


A firm supporter of the garbage in garbage out theory, I understand that high quality data is the prime driver for ML applications. In June 2018, at an Annual Google Campus Program in Israel, I talked about it. A pure delight, check out what else I talked about.

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Visualflux

Visualflux is an old side project that I worked on.

My work at United Technologies made me realise that people hardly use data to take any decisions. Some use past experience or their gut, while some just decide what they see first. The decisions are wrong five out of ten times.

I planned on taking up the challenge of eliminating the human bias and making people use data to take decisions.

Welcome Visualflux, a platform where people can upload and view structured data and can make visualisations to effectively know what the data says, leading to better decisions and a better society.


I had to abandon this project in Summer of '17, as my work at Playment was getting hampered, I wish to pick this up soon and contribute.

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United Technologies

United Technologies is an American MNC which develops and manufactures products in areas of aircraft engines, elevators, HVAC systems and building automation systems. It is also one of the biggest providers of defence equipements to the US Army.

I worked in the Intelligent Building Solutions vertical, developing & deploying products & solutions at client locations to integrate energy, lighting, security and safety into one system. This single system made buildings more energy efficient while still maintaining occupant comfort and high levels of productivity.


It is here I understood the concepts of evangelising highly technical products and solutions to the end users. This did not come in quickly as it took months to realise the actual impact.

The sheer amount of technical planning, product understanding, tight deadlines & stakeholder management that went into executing smart projects worth millions of dollars also allowed me to learn the core concepts of people and project management.

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Data Visualization

Having inspired from the TED talk given by Hans Rosling back in 2014, my interest rapidly grew into charts and visualisations (as is evident above).

Back in '15, I used Excel and Photoshop to create charts, now I use D3.js; the interest hasnt shifted, visuals than numbers still excite me.

Here are a couple of handsome visualisations I have worked on since then.

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Photography

I give complete credit of my photography skills to my alma mater and the friends I made there.

I was part of the presitigious Photography Club at BITS Pilani; which flourished my interest in Photography.

I am really proud of some the photos that I have clicked. Sharing them here with you.



Find the full list of photos on my 500px page here.

© Jitesh Motwani, 2020 | You're looking great today.