About me

My name is Declan Kutscher and I am a Master’s student at the University of Pittsburgh. I currently do machine learning research with Xiaowei Jia where I am focused on solving real-world problems in climate and ecological systems. I am interested in computer vision, remote sensing, and self-supervised learning. My master’s thesis topic is analyzing the newest computer vision models and backbones in their applications/adaptability to the domain of remote sensing. Computer vision research focuses on the most popular benchmarks; however, remote sensing has unique challenges of scale changes, noise, and frequent domain changes that should be addressed.

My research goals are to incorporate physical and neurological knowledge to achieve human-level efficiency in learning especially with self-supervised learning in computer vision. Significant advances in ML and AI have been achieved via the integration of cognitive sciences into ML and AI and I believe this trend will continue. I am particular interested in applying models to the unique challenges of climate science and remote sensing.

The works that inspired my aspirations include:

• Yann Lecun’s JEPA paper
• Mahmoud Assran’s I-JEPA paper
• Xiaowei Jia’s PGRNN paper
• Ritwik Gupta’s xBD paper
• x-View3-SAR challenge

Feel free to contact me at dtk28 ‘at’ pitt ‘dot’ edu. I am always open to new opportunities for research and collaboration.