PhD Success Stories - Michal Reinštein

Ing. Michal Reinštein, Ph.D.

Branch of study: Air Traffic Control

Supervisor: doc. Ing. Karel Draxler CSc.

Supervisor-specialist: Ing. Jan Roháč Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: Use of Adaptive Filtering Methods in Inertial Navigation Systems

Where do you currently work and what is the scope of your work?

I am currently working as a Chief Scientist at SpaceKnow, https://spaceknow.com/, US based company providing automated analytics of satellite imagery as a cloud service. My responsibilities at SpaceKnow are to lead our teams that design, implement, and deploy computer vision and machine (deep) learning based cloud solutions. Beside my passion for space technologies, robotics, especially the field of robot localisation and mapping, is also my passion. This is the reason why I am working part-time as assistant professor at the Dept. of Cybernetics, FEE, CTU in Prague, where I am one of the founding members of the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CRAS), http://robotics.fel.cvut.cz/cras/. As assistant professor I primarily supervise graduate and undergraduate students and contribute to the computer vision community as a reviewer at CVPR, ICCV, ECC, and ICRA conferences.

What has your doctoral studies given you for your current career?

The most important traits I have definitely gained during my Ph.D. study were the analytical & critical thinking and methodologically strong approach to problem solving using data driven approaches. Ph.D. study was a unique opportunity that allowed me to upgrade myself in the field that I was mostly interested in. It was the opportunity to travel the world, meet the best scientists and researchers in the field and gain experience that would be otherwise very hard or even impossible to get. Ph.D. study was also a great lesson in humility, because all the time you are surrounded by incredibly smart (usually smarter than me) and hard working people who aim to push the boundaries of the state-of-the-art as much as you do.

Where have you been during your doctoral studies and where have you been to postdoc?

Besides visits to regular international conferences all around the world, I have also spent incredible time at Prof. Pfeifer's AI Lab at the University of Zurich. After coming back from Zurich and submitting my thesis, I continued with my research in robotics at the Center for Machine Perception, Dept. of Cybernetics, under the great leadership of Prof. Hlaváč. Before starting full-time at SpaceKnow, my work was focused on Urban Search & Rescue robotics that was field-tested in cooperation with Italian and German firefighters.