Ashley Feniello
Principal Research Software Engineer
About
Since joining Microsoft in 1999, I’ve had an amazing and rather diverse experience; a dozen teams in several divisions shipping products and transitioning research to product groups. This includes shipping Bing v1, Local Search v1, Windows Mobile (years before the iPhone), Live Search for Mobile, Azure Mobile Services, OneApp, MSN publishing platform, and others including extremely interesting projects that have not been made public. Prior to Microsoft I worked on tools for database management at Intel. Before this, I was employee #2 at an Internet Startup company (1994) and also did automation work for paper publishing companies including Capital Cities/ABC publishing properties.
During the final half-decade on the robotics team I implemented program synthesis for learning by demonstration and a 3D manipulation UI and simulator. We published this work and I presented our paper at iROS 2014. I also implemented path planning and tracking for the navigation stack and before that I worked on HRI for our research prototype hardware affectionately known as “Max.” I even did firmware for microcontrollers at one point, including writing our own Forth and .NET JIT compiler. Again, very diverse experience even within robotics.
Currently, I’m working on the Platform for Situated Intelligence (aka \psi, aka ψ) — Machine learning tools and reactive system infrastructure, with ROS bridge, being applied to robotics scenarios.