Gemmechu Hassena

I am a CS PhD student at Cornell University working in the intersection of ML, CV and Graphics, advised by Bharath Hariharan and Steve Marschner. Prior to Cornell I earned my Bachelor's in Software Engineering from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. I have worked as a research intern at INRIA, Ecole Polytechnique with Maks Ovsjanikov. and at Univeristy of Michigan with David Fouhey on a Computer vision, Graphics and machine learning projects.

I'm also a Co-Founder of Eskalate and through our non-profit organization A2SV we upskill high-potential university students in Africa, connect them with opportunities at top tech companies.

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News

[August 2022] Started my PhD at Cornell!

[March 2022] Started working as a Team lead in Product Management at Eskalate

[Oct 2021] Started working as a research intern at INRIA, Ecole Polytechnique

[Oct 2021] Graduated from Addis Ababa University, bachelor of science in Software Engineering with Great distinction!

[Jun 2021] Quantifying Bird Skeletons accepted at CV4Animals Workshop In conjunction with CVPR 2021 [paper]

[Apr 2021] published a blog post on University of Michigan AI website! [blog]

[May 2020] Started working as a research intern at University of Michigan

[Dec 2019] Gave a talk on Afro-FM radio station about INSPIRE student club, AI in Ethiopia conference and the ICLR conference to be held in Addis Ababa [recording]

[Nov 2019] Organized Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's visit to Addis Ababa University [photo]

[Nov 2019] Invited Tensorflow Speaker on Devfest 2019 - Google Developer Group Addis [website]

[Oct 2019] Organized the 1st AI in Ethiopia Conference [website]

Publications
Quantifying Bird Skeletons
Zhizhuo Zhou , Gemmechu Hassena, Brian C. Weeks, David F. Fouhey
CV4Animals Workshop, CVPR 2021
[PDF] [Bibtex]

We introduced a dataset and system for measuring skeletal traits from museum specimens, which speeds up skeleton measurement by 15x. This research helped Ecologists in their study of how global warming causes the size of birds to shrink

Projects
Location Interlligence: Supermarket site selection
Gemmechu Hassena, Khalid Sultan , Tsedenia Solomon, Eyosias Samson
Graduation thesis project, Oct 2021
[PDF] [Code]

Given a location the AI model predicts its profitability if a supermarket store is to be opened at that location. By looking at number of Banks, Restaurants, Bus stations, distance from competitors, demographic data and others.

Scene understanding using humans as a ruler
Gemmechu Hassena, Chris Rockwell, David Fouhey
AURA, Sep 2020
[Video]

Developed a model that estimates depth and floor of a scene from RGB image, by using people's height as the reference

Expanding Horizons: Visual Indeterminacy as A Vehicle For Inquiry and New Connections
Devi Parikh , Gemmechu Hassena, Amal Alabdulkarim, Oana Ignat Jiasen Lu Ryan Murdock
Collaborated , Mar 2021
[website]
The adventure of rats
Gemmechu Hassena
Individual, Sep 2018

Developed a 3D game with Unity engine

Activities
A2SV - Africa to Silicon Valley
Mentor/student, Nov 2019 - present

A2SV upskills high-potential university students on Algorithm and data-structure and connect them with top tech companies. I have mentored 2 students, on January 2021, 59% of students passed Google internship interview.

INSPIRE
President, Nov 2019 — Nov 2020

Inspire is student club in AAU with 53 organizing members, Inspire works towards knowledge sharing and building the capacity of students specifically for CS students. We have organized Hackathons, Seminars, and AI in Ethiopia Conference.


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