Meet Indian-origin techie Ashok Elluswamy, Elon Musk's first recruit for Tesla Autopilot team

Ashok Elluswamy is the first Indian-origin employee who was the first to be hired for the Autopilot team of the US-based electric vehicle energy company Tesla. Elluswamy is recently in the news due to Elon Musk’s comments on Tesla Autopilot and Elluswamy in a recent interview.

“Ashok is actually the head of Autopilot engineering. Andrej is director of AI; people often give me too much credit and give Andrej too much credit. The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. Some of the smartest people in the world,” Musk said. The Tesla and SpaceX boss replied to this video and tweeted, “Ashok was the first person recruited from my tweet saying that Tesla is starting an Autopilot team!”

WHO IS ASHOK ELLUSWAMY?

Ashok Elluswamy is a software engineer associated with Tesla for over eight years. His stint at Tesla began as a Software Engineer for its Autopilot division in January 2014. Two years down the line, he rose up the ranks to become a Senior Software Engineer in the same division in June 2016. In September 2017, Elluswamy got another promotion and went onto become the senior Staff Software Engineer, a post he held till April 2019. After this, he was appointed as the Director of the Autopilot Software in May 2019.

As the Director of Tesla’s Autopilot Software, Elluswamy is responsible for leading the autonomy software team for the autopilot division and creation of large-scale automatic ground truth pipelines to train neural networks with massive amounts of diverse, high-quality data, as per his LinkedIn profile.

Besides this, he is also responsible for developing an accurate and detailed geometric and semantic understanding of the world using the best of both machine-learned and engineered models and building robust, causal, predictive models for other agents in both geometry and semantic state spaces.

Prior to joining Tesla, Elluswamy was associated with Volkswagen Electronic Research Lab for around seven months and also with WABCO Vehicle Control Systems for almost two years. 

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai and a Master’s degree in Robotics System Development from Carnegie Mellon University.

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