I design and build reliable end-to-end robotic systems, from memory-safe SLAM frameworks to perception pipelines and fleet software for robots in the field. My work sits at the intersection of systems research and applied engineering, with 8 years of research and industry experience. As an early engineer at a robotics startup, I lead perception and fleet infrastructure projects, balancing rapid field experimentation with systems that hold up at scale.
I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University at Buffalo, where my research focused on the "systems" dimension of Visual SLAM -- how system design drives performance and reliability in real-world environments. I led the development of Bauhaus, a modular, memory-safe Visual SLAM framework in Rust, and the first systematic study of SLAM frameworks as performance-critical software.
I work mostly in C++, Rust, Python, ROS 2, and CUDA. Earlier, I worked on production systems at Google and edX.
Publications
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(In submission) Sofiya Semenova, Nitin Vinod, Steven Y. Ko, Yu David Liu, Lukasz Ziarek, and Karthik Dantu. "Bauhaus: A Modular, Memory-Safe Framework for Next-Generation Visual SLAM Systems."
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Sofiya Semenova, Steven Y. Ko, Yu David Liu, Lukasz Ziarek, and Karthik Dantu. "A Comprehensive Study of Systems Challenges in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Systems." ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS). 2024.
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Sofiya Semenova, Steven Y. Ko, Yu David Liu, Lukasz Ziarek, and Karthik Dantu. "A Quantitative Analysis of System
Bottlenecks in Visual SLAM." ACM International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile). 2022. Best Poster Award
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Sofiya Semenova, Pranay Meshram, Timothy Chase, Steven Y. Ko, Yu David Liu, Lukasz Ziarek, and Karthik Dantu.
"A Modular, Extensible Framework for
Modern Visual SLAM Systems. (Poster)” International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services
(MobiSys). 2022.
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Ali J. Ben Ali, Marziye Kouroshli*, Sofiya Semenova*, Zakieh Sadat Hashemifar, Steven Y. Ko, and Karthik Dantu. "Edge-SLAM: Edge-Assisted Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping." ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS). 2022. (*joint second authors)
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Ali J. Ben Ali, Sofiya Semenova, and Karthik Dantu. "Platform Variability in Edge-Cloud Vision Systems. (Poster)" ACM International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile). 2019.
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Ryan Marcus, Olga Papaemmanouil, Sofiya Semenova, and Solomon Garber. "NashDB: An End-to-End Economic Method for Elastic Database Fragmentation, Replication, and Provisioning." ACM Special Interest Group in Data Management (SIGMOD). 2018.
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Ryan Marcus, Sofiya Semenova, and Olga Papaemmanouil. "A Learning-based Service for Cost and Performance Management of Cloud Databases (Demonstration)." IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). 2017.
Projects
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For older projects, see the projects page of this website.
My Erdos number is 5, and my Kristen Stewart number is 6.