David M. Rosen

About

David M. Rosen is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Mathematics, and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences (by courtesy).  Prior to joining Northeastern, he was a Research Scientist at Oculus Research (now Meta Reality Labs) from 2016 to 2018, and a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) from 2018 to 2021.

He is broadly interested in the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of trustworthy autonomy.  His research applies tools from nonlinear optimization, differential geometry and topology, abstract algebra, and probability and statistics to devise principled, computationally efficient, and provably robust algorithms for machine perception and control.  Much of his recent work has explored the use of principled approximation schemes (such as convex relaxation) to efficiently compute provably-good solutions of challenging machine perception problems (such as SLAM).  

His work has been recognized with multiple awards at flagship international venues, including the inaugural Best Paper Award at the International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (2016), selection as an RSS Pioneer (2019), a Best Student Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems (2020), and an Honorable Mention for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award (2021).

Selected Publications

• Kevin Doherty, David M. Rosen, and John J. Leonard. “Performance Guarantees for Spectral Initialization in Rotation Averaging and Pose-Graph SLAM”. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Philadelphia, PA, May 2022, pp. 5608–5614.  DOI: 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811788
• Yulun Tian, Kasra Khosoussi, David M. Rosen, and Jonathan P. How. “Distributed Certifiably Correct Pose-Graph Optimization”. In: IEEE Transactions on Robotics 37.6 (Dec. 2021), pp. 2137–2156.  DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2021.3072346.  Honorable Mention, King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award
• David M. Rosen, Kevin J. Doherty, Antonio Terán Espinoza, and John J. Leonard. “Advances in Inference and Representation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping”. In: Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems 4 (May 2021), pp. 215–242.  DOI: 10.1146/annurev-control-072720-082553. Invited article
• Frank Dellaert*, David M. Rosen* , Jing Wu, Robert Mahony, and Luca Carlone. “Shonan Rotation Averaging: Global Optimality by Surfing SO(p)^n ”. In: European Conference on Computer Vision. Aug. 2020. DOI : 10.1007/978-3-030-58539-6_18.  Spotlight talk (top 5%)
• Valentin Peretroukhin, Matthew Giamou, David M. Rosen, W. Nicholas Greene, Nicholas Roy, and Jonathan Kelly. “A Smooth Representation of Belief over SO(3) for Deep Rotation Learning with Uncertainty”. In: Robotics: Science and Systems. Corvallis, OR, July 2020.  Best Student Paper Award
• David M. Rosen. “Scalable Low-Rank Semidefinite Programming for Certifiably Correct Machine Perception”. In: International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics. June 2020.  DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-66723-8_33
• David M. Rosen, Luca Carlone, Afonso S. Bandeira, and John J. Leonard. “SE-Sync: A Certifiably Correct Algorithm for Synchronization over the Special Euclidean Group”. In: International Journal of Robotics Research 38.2–3 (Mar. 2019), pp. 95–125. DOI: 10.1177/0278364918784361.  Invited article (WAFR 2016 special issue).
• David M. Rosen, Luca Carlone, Afonso S. Bandeira, and John J. Leonard. “A Certifiably Correct Algorithm for Synchronization over the Special Euclidean Group”. In: International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics. San Francisco, CA, Dec. 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-43089-4_5. Best Paper Award
• David M. Rosen, Michael Kaess, and John J. Leonard. “RISE: An Incremental Trust-Region Method for Robust Online Sparse Least-Squares Estimation”. In: IEEE Transactions on Robotics 30.5 (Oct. 2014), pp. 1091–1108. DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2014.2321852

Students

Nov 10, 2023

Co-op and Research Puts Student on Robotics Career Path

Xavier Hubbard, MS’23, robotics, completed a co-op at Venca Robotics and conducted research as part of his master’s project. Academics, combined with the experiential learning and job experience, helped him land a job as a robotics engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Faculty

May 24, 2023

Kostas Research Institute Receives $13M U.S. Army Contract for Wireless Research

The Kostas Research Institute (KRI) at Northeastern University has been awarded $13 million by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for foundational research into Cognitive Distributed Sensing in Congested Radio Frequency Environments. KRI and five partner institutions will conduct innovative research to enable technologies in distributed machine learning, signal processing algorithms, and computational, sensing, and communication hardware infrastructure for distributed sensing and communication.

Faculty

Aug 18, 2021

New Faculty Spotlight: David Rosen

David Rosen joins the Electrical and Computer Engineering department in August 2021 as an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in Mathematics.

View All Related News