About Me

I'm an early career ML researcher at UCLA, where I'm currently focusing on improving the generalization of language models and tuning a VLA's planner.

Previously, I was a startup CTO and entrepreneur. I co-founded Mapsense, a geospatial data startup acquired by Apple in 2015, and after integrating our technology I went on to work on map maintenance. I later co-founded and was CTO of August Health, a healthcare SaaS platform for assisted living facilities, where I helped grow the engineering team through its Series A. I also worked briefly as interim CTO of Almond ObGyn, my wife's company.

Some of my favorite projects have been simple and public-facing: I built "real-life Pong," an AR iPhone game that reached 60,000+ downloads (mostly in China), and I taught photography to people experiencing homelessness on and off for four years (SF Street View).

I studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at UC Berkeley and began a PhD in NLP at Stony Brook. For a visual overview of the work I've done, see my timeline.

Contact

Reach me at mikeywatts+xyz@berkeley.edu, or find me on LinkedIn.