Johnathan Chiu

I'm John. I like working across research and product.

Right now, I'm hacking on things around simulation, sim-ready articulated assets, and spatial intelligence.

What I've done in the past

I was a research scientist at RunwayML and helped contribute to Gen-1 and Gen-2. I also spent time with the team at Normal Computing doing research (Posteriors, Neural CDEs), and later led development of agents at Hedra.

Along the way, I also worked (interned) at Snapchat, SandboxAQ (previously Google X), and Nylas. And, if you count this, I interned at Boeing back in high school where I worked on Echo Voyager (probably did more ping-pong than work though which is why it might not count).

Research Highlights

Will fill this in at some point. For now, just check my Google Scholar if you're interested in that kind of thing. Will give a shoutout to some of the best researchers/friends I've had the pleasure of working with though - Patrick Esser, Andi Gu, Sam Duffield, and Matt Zhou (amongst others).

Project Highlights

3D Code Generation
Building code SDKs for LLMs to create large 3d Minecraft, architecture, and voxel structures. Lots of really neat ideas around animating scenes and more. Collaboration with Matt.
Site Demo
Boosted Board Controller
Dove really deep into learning about Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE protocols. Reverse-engineered the pairing protocol on Boosted Boards after they went out of business. Probably the first person to successfully do so.
Blog Code Demo
Palette
An app to remix your photos by messing with the metadata of the original image. Research into using differential diffusion to maintain subject consistency before image-to-image models got good. Collaboration with Sakun.
Site Download Demo
Patchworks
A distributed search engine to index segments of videos provided a user's search query (think of Perplexity for YouTube). Parsing video and audio content with LLMs to clip together search content. Collaboration with Laurent and Sakun.
Demo Inspiration
Floating Hand Canvas
Started with a whiteboard for floating hands that went viral on X, play around with it yourself. Leveraging MediaPipe models with TensorFlow.js. Collaboration with the tldraw team.
Site Code Demo

Then, turned into a canvas for turning your drawings into images with image-to-image models.
Site Demo
Gumball
Experimented with a companion coder to help you solve leetcode-esque problems before agents became popular. Probably could have been the first Cursor before Cursor was a thing (sigh). Collaboration with Avinash.
Site Demo
Cetacea
Back in high school, I led a team to build underwater ROVs (remotely operated vehicles). Something I'm still really proud of to this day and always worth mentioning.
Project

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