My name is John Turner. This page is for me to share my love of all things Graphics, Physically-Based Simulation and Machine Learning by showcasing a few of my more interesting past projects and research interests from throughout my professional and academic career. I wrote all the code used to build these projects, unless specified otherwise, including all the UIs (no external UI toolkits were used). I've been developing UIs for interactive applications since the early 90s, so building interfaces is kind of in my DNA.
From February 2023 to present, as well as from March 2020 to March 2022, I've been a contingent worker/research engineer at Meta AI Research as one of the primary code contributors to the Habitat project, a simulation platform for research in Embodied AI. My focus has been developing in C++ and Python, expanding the functionality, flexibility and stability of the simulation platform, Habitat-Sim, as well as building and verifying datasets for RL training.
I have a Master's degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, specializing in Graphics, Simulation and Physically-Based Animation and how Machine Learning (i.e. Deep Reinforcement Learning) can be used to solve problems in these domains. In 2017 I started pursuing a PhD at Tech, exploring how to derive control policies for assistive robots through interaction with simulated impaired bipeds using Reinforcement Learning, but I lost my advisor to Stanford and subsequently went on a Leave of Absence from the program in November of 2019 due to health and family concerns that became permanent due to Covid-19.
I funded my PhD by being one of the Head TAs for the CS-6515-OMS, Graduate Algorithms for the OMS Master's degree program, where I solely developed, graded and taught various algorithmic-based coding projects (i.e. implement Page Rank) to approximately 400 people each semester. I received my Master's degree in December of 2016, and throughout my Master's Degree I not only TA'ed numerous classes but also worked full time as a Data Scientist at IgnitionOne, formerly an online marketing company.
