Mahmoud Ali

Experience

Perception & Navigation Engineer — NomaVerse, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA Apr 2026 – Present
  • Developed scene-understanding methods using scene graphs and vision-language models (VLMs).
  • Validated object detection, anomaly classification, and semantic segmentation approaches.
  • Developed search-based exploration and navigation algorithms to map and traverse unknown environments.
  • Interfaced perception, navigation, and high-level control with a cognitive decision layer.
Robotics Software Engineer — Technical University of Delft (TU Delft), Delft, Netherlands Jan 2019 – Jan 2021
  • Integrated and tested a ROS control hardware interface in CoppeliaSim for a mobile manipulator (Boxer + Franka arm).
  • Developed a Gazebo plugin integrating the pedestrian simulator (pedsim) into Gazebo.
  • Developed jerk-limited motion-generation algorithms for industrial robots, in collaboration with Iron-Ox.
  • Managed the daily activities of the RobotUnion project (part of the EU Horizon 2020 program).
Research Assistant Intern — Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Genoa, Italy Feb – Aug 2018
  • Developed a biologically inspired approach for stereo-vision depth estimation leveraging event-based cameras.
  • Implemented and tested a Feature-Based Stereo-Spiking Neural Network on synthetic and real data.

Education

Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems Engineering 2021–Present
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering — Indiana University Bloomington, USA
  • Unifying navigation, mapping, and exploration into a single cohesive framework.
  • Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments; memory-efficient representations of high-fidelity sensory data.
M.Sc. in Advanced Robotics — EMARO+ (Erasmus Mundus) 2016–2018
École Centrale de Nantes, France (Year 1) & University of Genoa, Italy (Year 2)
  • Master’s thesis at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Genoa: Event-based bio-inspired depth estimation for scene exploration using iCub.
B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering (Control Engineering) 2014
Menoufia University, Egypt — Grade 90.4% (Rank 2/380)

Awards & honors

2nd Place — ChengWu Innovation Challenge2025
Erasmus Mundus Scholarship — EMARO+ joint M.Sc.2016
Rank 1/7 — EMARO+ first year, École Centrale de Nantes2017
Rank 2/380 — B.Sc. Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University2014

Skills

Programming: C/C++, Python, MATLAB

Robotics & ML: ROS 1 / ROS 2, Gazebo, CoppeliaSim, OpenCV, PCL, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Simulink

Tools: Git, Linux, Bash, LaTeX