Ashok Elluswamy

Some Lesser Known Facts About Ashok Elluswamy

• Ashok Elluswamy is a software engineer of Indian origin.

• In 2010, he joined WABCO Vehicle Control Systems (an American provider of electronic braking, stability, suspension, and transmission automation systems for heavy-duty commercial vehicles) in Chennai as a Software Engineer. He resigned from the position in 2012.
  

• At WABCO Vehicle Control Systems, Ashok worked to establish real-time performance guarantees of actuators through brake actuation modules. He was also involved with the development and validation of onboard and offboard diagnostics software for the vehicle’s Electronic Control Unit.

• He then worked as a Research Intern at Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab, Belmont, California, for around seven months.
  

• In 2014, Ashok joined Tesla, a US-based electric vehicle energy company, as a software engineer for its Autopilot division.
  

• He has been associated with Tesla for around eight years and has served the company in various capacities. From 2016 to 2017, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer. He was then promoted to the position of Senior Staff Software Engineer. In 2019, Elluswamy was announced as the Director of Tesla’s Autopilot division.

• As the head of the Autopilot Software at Tesla, Ashok led the autonomy software team. He also worked for the creation of large-scale automatic ground truth pipelines to train neural networks with massive amounts of diverse high-quality data. He also worked on the development of accurate and detailed geometric and semantic understanding of the world using the best of both machine-learned and engineered models.

• In 2021, the founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk revealed that Ashok was the first person who got hired for Tesla’s Autopilot team. He said,
  

  I tweeted that Tesla is about to launch an autopilot team. Through that tweet, Ashok was the first to be selected in the autopilot team.”

  Musk added,

  Ashok is actually the head of Autopilot engineering.”

• Elluswamy is fluent in four languages- Hindi, English, Tamil, and Telugu.

• One of Ashok’s teachers at Carnegie Mellon University John Dolan praised him on his LinkedIn account. He wrote,
  

  Ashok was one of my top students during 2012-13 in the master’s in Robotic Systems Development Project Course at Carnegie Mellon University. He showed excellent initiative in learning a wide variety of topics useful to his explosive ordnance disposal robot project, notably stereo vision, motion planning, and various software packages needed for implementation. Ashok learns continuously and has high energy and motivation.”

• Elluswamy is settled in San Francisco Bay Area, California.