My name is Declan Kutscher and I currently work as a Research Engineer with Dr. Trevor Darrell’s group at UC Berkeley (BAIR) with Dr. Ritwik Gupta, and as a Visiting Student Researcher in the NeuroAgents Lab at Carnegie Mellon University led by Dr. Aran Nayebi.
I previusly completed my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where I work with Dr. Xiaowei Jia on machine learning for climate and environmental systems. My thesis examined the effectiveness of in-domain pretraining for remote sensing tasks.
My research focuses on self-supervised systems that allocate computation and representation adaptively for the real-world. I work on computer vision, remote sensing, and reinforcement learning, with recent projects in physics-guided graph learning, long-sequence vision models, and world-model based skill discovery.
I am especially interested in attention and perception strategies that improve efficiency, robustness, and generalization for climate, disaster response, and embodied intelligence applications.
Outside of research I enjoy backpacking, film, music, and cats.
Feel free to contact me at declank @ berkeley.edu. I am always open to new collaborations.