Ashton Fagg, PhD

Chief Technologist

Ashton Fagg, PhD is an experienced software engineer and computer scientist. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Systems from the University of Southern Queensland, and a PhD in Computer Vision from the Queensland University of Technology.

Dr Fagg has a range of experience in building real-time, robust and high-quality perception systems. He is listed as an inventor on multiple patents in the autonomous driving space, and is a coauthor of a number of highly cited papers in the field of Computer Vision.

His areas of expertise are largely centered around computer vision and sensor fusion, and specifically in how to build correct and performant real-time perception software.

He has made a name for himself as an accomplished computer vision engineer, with extensive experience building systems using:

  • C++ (C++11 and later)

  • Python

  • OpenCV

  • Eigen

  • Ceres Solver

  • Custom libraries and tooling

Dr Fagg has extensive knowledge of CPU architecture, SIMD pipelines and general high performance computing principles. In previous positions, he has:

  • Designed & implemented safety critical & latency sensitive perception software for autonomous vehicles (specifically, backup systems in case of degraded performance of the main system).

  • Designed & implemented analysis and metrics tooling for autonomous vehicles, supporting the end-to-end evaluation of multi-sensor perception systems

  • Prototyped a new type of data analysis pipeline to help ML practitioners better understand dataset composition.

  • Initial design and implementation of a new perception system as the founding engineer at a geospatial software startup. This included: a full ML pipeline, a custom C++ sensor fusion and processing pipeline, algorithm design & implementation, support infrastructure and tooling, design of annotation policy & process, and a fully custom data ingest pipeline.

Dr Fagg is a licensed amateur radio operator (N3AJF), and enjoys experimenting with antenna design and weak signal modes in his spare time.

For more information, please see:

Emmett Galea-Fagg

Chief Morale Officer

Emmett Galea-Fagg is our Pembroke Welsh Corgi who fulfils many roles at AFWare. In addition to his role as Chief Morale Officer, he is also our office manager, chief of staff, quality tester and official snack tester.

Outside of his duties around the office, he can be found eating, napping, digging or otherwise being a dog. He enjoy bow ties, belly rubs and head scritches.