Erich Owens

Modernizing drone vision software for customer and insurer property understanding and protection needs

• Building AI/CV systems for geospatial intelligence, roof damage assessment, and property analytics

Managed mobile and ML engineers integrating computer vision and LLMs into composer and creation tools; led research and development for photo understanding, event detection, and collage creation

• Shipped AI-powered editing features to billions of users across Facebook mobile apps

Led avatar customization, asset pipeline, and ML integration; managed 40+ engineers across the org including engineering managers; built tooling to let artists and PMs understand ML decisions

• Scaled avatar systems across Meta's VR ecosystem; shipped ML-powered generation with human-in-the-loop visualization tools

Built computer vision and ML for Facebook face tech including mobile AR face tracker, FACS expression tracking, and audio-based lipsync

• Shipped production face tracking to Instagram AR effects used by millions daily

Led effect curation and personalized ranking; hired art curators; built tools for surfacing avant-garde Spark effects

• Improved discovery of high-quality AR effects, increasing engagement and creator retention

Managed AI engineers on embodied agents, MRI compressed sensing, AlphaZero open-source; contributed to fastMRI website/dataset release and competition kick-off

• Supported open-source AI research including fastMRI dataset release with NYU Langone

Built 'avatar from photo' system in 2 months for Facebook's first social VR app; hired ex-Pixar talent for parametric avatars

• Shipped company's best-reviewed avatars (FastCompany coverage); launched Facebook Spaces to public

LIDAR-based social VR room scans; thermal haptics research; peltier-cooled VR controllers

• Demonstrated novel haptic feedback modality; filed patent on thermal haptics

Built VR simulations for VR designers pre-hand-controller launch

• Used VR to design VR experiences, accelerating product development cycles

Overhauled comment ranking for quality and civility; semantic similarity, Thompson sampling; co-authored PNLambda config language; authored Commentology tool

• Commentology tool still used company-wide a decade later; significantly improved comment quality

Built first CV-based filter for Facebook news feed (hackathon win/patent); created JS visualization + Presto SQL tooling for experimentation

• Pioneered computer vision in newsfeed ranking; filed patent; improved user experience

Entity disambiguation, industry/subject prediction, news clustering, recommendation system

• Linked 500k users by semantic content; enabled personalized news discovery

Network visualizations of company interrelationships, text mining, unsupervised learning for cluster analysis

• Built visualization tools for understanding company ecosystems

Taught AP Calculus to highly-motivated secondary students

• Shared mathematical foundations with next generation

Stochastic and partial differential equations research

• Contributed to mathematical research in probability theory

Systems engineering on Project Constellation

• Contributed to NASA's next-generation spacecraft program

X-ray crystallography of Nitinol (nickel-titanium shape memory alloy) under sustained strain; developed algorithmic inference of crystallographic patterns from powder diffraction data

• Published and presented paper on algorithmic inference of x-ray crystallographic patterns of Nitinol under sustained strain