Jerrin Bright

I am a Founding Engineer at Mecka AI, building the data and deployment layer for humanoids. We collect large-scale real-world data to train embodied agents, where I work broadly on egocentric perception, multimodal model development, and scalable pretraining, post-training, and data pipelines that support VLA and world model systems for pioneering robotics and AI companies. I'm also a doctoral candidate at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Dr. John Zelek.

My research studies how machines infer geometry, motion, and dynamics from sparse visual inputs, with interests in human motion understanding, vision-language-action models, and multimodal data systems for embodied agents. Previously, I collaborated with the Baltimore Orioles (MLB) for 3+ years on robust baseball player kinematics analysis and performance evaluation.

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profile photo
Mecka UWaterloo Orioles IISc
McMaster ASU Yuan-Ze VIT

News

  • [2026/07] 🎉 Awarded the Merit Scholarship Award at the University of Waterloo!
  • [2026/06] 🎉 CoGS is submitted to WACV 2027! [arXiv]
  • [2026/06] Attended CVPR 2026 in Denver, Colorado.
  • [2026/05] 🚀 DraftPilot is released, a local-first AI workspace for research papers! [Website]
  • [2026/05] 🎉 DreamPose3D gets accepted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia!
  • [2026/04] Advanced to PhD candidacy at the University of Waterloo.
  • [2026/03] 🎉 Three papers get accepted to CVPR Workshop 2026!
  • [2025/12] Attended NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego.
  • [2025/09] Joined Mecka AI as Founding Engineer.
  • [2025/08] On-site with Baltimore Orioles for PitcherNet deployment.
  • [2025/05] 🎉 Gen4D gets accepted to CVPR Workshop 2025.
  • [2025/05] 🎉 SportMamba gets accepted as Oral at CVPR Workshop 2025!
  • [2025/04] Featured in media for PitcherNet.
  • [2024/09] 🎉 TokenCliPose gets accepted to NeurIPS 2024!
  • [2024/05] 🏆 Best Paper Award at CRV 2024!
  • [2024/04] 🎉 PitcherNet gets accepted as Oral at CVPR Workshop 2024!

Timeline & Experience
Aug 2025 - Present
Founding Engineer, Mecka AI
Egocentric Perception, Vision-Language Models, Embodied Agents
Sep 2022 - Apr 2026
MITACS Accelerate Research Intern, Baltimore Orioles
Sports Vision, Biomechanical Analysis, Neural Rendering
Jul 2021 - Apr 2022
Research Intern, AI & Robotics Lab with ARTPARK, Indian Institute of Science
Autonomous UAV Navigation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Multimodal Learning
Jul 2021 - Sep 2021
Globalink Research Intern, Robotics and Automation Lab, McMaster University
Soft Robotics, Modeling and Analysis, Simulation
May 2021 - Jul 2021
Summer Research Intern, Edifice Lab, Arizona State University
Photogrammetry, 3D Scene Reconstruction, Sensor Fusion
Oct 2020 - Apr 2021
Autonomous System Developer, Aero2Astro
Visual Odometry, GPS-Denied Navigation, VI-SLAM
Apr 2020 - Jun 2020
Project Research Intern, Speech and Image Processing Lab, Yuan-Ze University
Localization, Conditional Random Fields, Anomaly Detection

Things I Built

DraftPilot
Local-first AI workspace for writing LaTeX research papers with local PDF compilation, SyncTeX navigation, linked codebase context, todo planning, and deadline management.
Website | Discord
OpenForm Labs
Private beta for teams, coaches, and player development groups, turning ordinary baseball and softball video into accessible 3D biomechanics insights and shareable athlete reports.
@article{bright2026injuryrisk, title={Scalable Injury-Risk Screening in Baseball Pitching From Broadcast Video}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Mende, Justin and Zelek, John}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04864}, year={2026} }
@article{bright2026pitchtype, title={Interpretable Pre-Release Baseball Pitch Type Anticipation from Broadcast 3D Kinematics}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Lu, Michelle and Zelek, John}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04874}, year={2026} }
@article{bright2025avatar4d, title={Avatar4D: Synthesizing Domain-Specific 4D Humans for Real-World Pose Estimation}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Wang, Zhibo and Klepachevskyi, Dmytro and Chen, Yuhao and Rambhatla, Sirisha and Clausi, David and Zelek, John}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16199}, year={2025} }
@article{bright2025dreampose3d, title={DreamPose3D: Hallucinative Diffusion with Prompt Learning for 3D Human Pose Estimation}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Chen, Yuhao and Zelek, John}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.09502}, year={2025} }
@inproceedings{iaboni2025position, title={Position Paper: New Views of Shots - Towards Measures of Net Visibility and Reachability}, author={Iaboni, Evan and Negulescu, Sebastian and Pitassi, Miles and Nazemi, Amir and Bright, Jerrin and Chomko, Vasyl and Clausi, David A and Dickinson, Sven and Brecht, Tim}, booktitle={Linkoping Hockey Analytics Conference}, year={2025} }
@inproceedings{bright2025gen4d, title={Gen4D: Synthesizing Humans and Scenes in the Wild}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Wang, Zhibo and Chen, Yuhao and Rambhatla, Sirisha and Clausi, David and Zelek, John}, booktitle={IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops}, year={2025} }
@inproceedings{khanna2025sportmamba, title={SportMamba: Adaptive Non-Linear Multi-Object Tracking with State Space Models for Team Sports}, author={Khanna, Dheeraj and Bright, Jerrin and Chen, Yuhao and Zelek, John}, booktitle={IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops}, year={2025} }
@inproceedings{balaji2024seeing, title={Seeing Beyond the Crop: Using Language Priors for Out-of-Bounding Box Keypoint Prediction}, author={Balaji, Bavesh and Bright, Jerrin and Chen, Yuhao and Rambhatla, Sirisha and Zelek, John and Clausi, David}, booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)}, year={2024} }
@inproceedings{bright2024pitchernet, title={PitcherNet: Powering the Moneyball Evolution in Baseball Video Analytics}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Balaji, Bavesh and Chen, Yuhao and Clausi, David A and Zelek, John}, booktitle={IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops}, year={2024} }
@inproceedings{bright2024d2ahmr, title={Distribution and Depth-Aware Transformers for 3D Human Mesh Recovery}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Balaji, Bavesh and Prakash, Harish and Chen, Yuhao and Clausi, David A and Zelek, John}, booktitle={21st Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV)}, year={2024} }
@inproceedings{balaji2024domain, title={Domain-Guided Masked Autoencoders for Unique Player Identification}, author={Balaji, Bavesh and Bright, Jerrin and Rambhatla, Sirisha and Chen, Yuhao and Wong, Alexander and Zelek, John and Clausi, David A}, booktitle={21st Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV)}, year={2024} }
@inproceedings{bright2023mitigating, title={Mitigating Motion Blur for Robust 3D Baseball Player Pose Modeling for Pitch Analysis}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Chen, Yuhao and Zelek, John}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports (MMSports)}, pages={63--71}, year={2023}, organization={ACM} }
@phdthesis{bright2025worldreconstruction, title={4D World Reconstruction of Humans, Scenes, and Camera Systems}, author={Bright, Jerrin}, school={University of Waterloo}, year={2025}, note={PhD Comprehensive Exam} }
@mastersthesis{bright2024robust, title={Robust 3D Human Modeling for Baseball Sports Analytics}, author={Bright, Jerrin}, school={University of Waterloo}, year={2024} }
@bachelorsthesis{bright2022uav, title={An End-to-End Autonomous UAV System in GPS-Denied and Unstructured Environments}, author={Bright, Jerrin and Rajkumar, Suryaprakash and Selvakumar, Arockia}, school={Vellore Institute of Technology}, year={2022} }

Research

See Google Scholar for a full list.

CoGS architecture
CoGS: Compositional Dynamic Human-Object Scene Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Video
Jerrin Bright, John Zelek
Submitted to WACV, 2027
ArXiv
Injury-Risk Screening
Scalable Injury-Risk Screening in Baseball Pitching From Broadcast Video
Jerrin Bright, Justin Mende, John Zelek
Accepted to CVPR Workshop, 2026
ArXiv | Poster | BibTeX
Pitch Type Anticipation
Interpretable Pre-Release Baseball Pitch Type Anticipation from Broadcast 3D Kinematics
Jerrin Bright, Michelle Lu, John Zelek
Accepted to CVPR Workshop, 2026
ArXiv | Poster | BibTeX
Avatar4D
Avatar4D: Synthesizing Domain-Specific 4D Humans for Real-World Pose Estimation
Jerrin Bright, Zhibo Wang, Dmytro Klepachevskyi, Yuhao Chen, Sirisha Rambhatla, David Clausi, John Zelek
Accepted to CVPR Workshop, 2026
ArXiv | Poster | BibTeX
DreamPose3D
DreamPose3D: Hallucinative Diffusion with Prompt Learning for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2026
ArXiv | BibTeX
Hockey Analytics
Position Paper: New Views of Shots - Towards Measures of Net Visibility and Reachability
Evan Iaboni, Sebastian Negulescu, Miles Pitassi, Amir Nazemi, Jerrin Bright, Vasyl Chomko, David A. Clausi, Sven Dickinson, Tim Brecht
Linkoping Hockey Analytics Conference, 2025
Paper | BibTeX
Gen4D
Gen4D: Synthesizing Humans and Scenes in the Wild
Jerrin Bright, Zhibo Wang, Yuhao Chen, Sirisha Rambhatla, David Clausi, John Zelek
CVPR Workshop, 2025  Poster
ArXiv | BibTeX
SportMamba
SportMamba: Adaptive Non-Linear Multi-Object Tracking with State Space Models for Team Sports
Dheeraj Khanna, Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek
CVPR Workshop, 2025
Paper | Poster | BibTeX
NeurIPS
Seeing Beyond the Crop: Using Language Priors for Out-of-Bounding Box Keypoint Prediction
Bavesh Balaji, Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, Sirisha Rambhatla, John Zelek, David Clausi
NeurIPS, 2024  Poster
Paper | OpenReview | Slides | Poster | BibTeX
PitcherNet
PitcherNet: Powering the Moneyball Evolution in Baseball Video Analytics
Jerrin Bright, Bavesh Balaji, Yuhao Chen, David A Clausi, John Zelek
CVPR Workshop, 2024  Oral
ArXiv | Paper | Video | Slides | Poster | BibTeX
D2AHMR
Distribution and Depth-Aware Transformers for 3D Human Mesh Recovery
Jerrin Bright, Bavesh Balaji, Harish Prakash, Yuhao Chen, David A Clausi, John Zelek
CRV, 2024  Oral  Best Paper Award
ArXiv | Paper | Video | Slides | Poster | BibTeX
Domain-Guided MAE
Domain-Guided Masked Autoencoders for Unique Player Identification
Bavesh Balaji, Jerrin Bright, Sirisha Rambhatla, Yuhao Chen, Alexander Wong, John Zelek, David A Clausi
CRV, 2024  Oral
ArXiv | Paper | Slides | Poster | BibTeX
Motion Blur
Mitigating Motion Blur for Robust 3D Baseball Player Pose Modeling for Pitch Analysis
Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek
ACM MMSports Workshop, 2023
Paper | Slides | Poster | BibTeX

Thesis
PhD Comprehensive Exam
4D World Reconstruction of Humans, Scenes, and Camera Systems
Supervisor: John Zelek
PhD Comprehensive Exam, University of Waterloo, 2026 · GPA: 4.0/4.0
Slides | BibTeX
thesis
Robust 3D Human Modeling for Baseball Sports Analytics
Supervisor: John Zelek
Master's Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2024 · GPA: 3.9/4.0
UWSpace | Slides | BibTeX
thesis
An End-to-End Autonomous UAV System in GPS-Denied and Unstructured Environments
Supervisor: Arockia Selvakumar
Bachelor's Thesis, VIT Chennai, 2022 · GPA: 3.7/4.0
PDF | Slides | BibTeX

Selected Awards

  • [2026] Merit Scholarship Award, University of Waterloo
  • [2026] Graduate Student Research Dissemination Award, University of Waterloo
  • [2025] International Doctoral Student Award, University of Waterloo
  • [2025] Engineering Graduate Merit Award, University of Waterloo
  • [2025] University of Waterloo Graduate Scholarship, University of Waterloo
  • [2024] Best Paper Award (Computer Vision), Conference on Robots and Vision
  • [2024] MITACS Accelerate International Award, University of Waterloo
  • [2024] International Master's Award of Excellence, University of Waterloo
  • [2024] Graduate Research Studentship, University of Waterloo
  • [2022] MITACS Globalink Graduate Fellowship, MITACS Canada
  • [2022] Best Outgoing Student - Robotics Club, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India
  • [2021] MITACS Graduate Research Fellowship, University of Waterloo
  • [2020] Outstanding Paper Award, RIACT International Conference

Academic Service

Reviewer: CVPR, BMVC, NeurIPS, 3DV, IROS, EAAI, CVSports, CVIU, MMSports, TNNLS, TCSVT, TMM, CVIS, CTIS, IMAVIS, The Journal of Supercomputing

Technical Program Member: ACM MMSports @ ACM Multimedia 2024

Teaching Assistant:

  • SYDE461: Systems Design Capstone Project 1 (Fall 2023, Fall 2024)
  • SYDE462: Systems Design Capstone Project 2 (Winter 2024, Winter 2025)
  • SYDE361: Systems Design Methods 1: Needs Analysis and Prototyping (Summer 2024)
  • BME361: Biomedical Engineering Design (Winter 2023)
  • BME101L: Communications in Biomedical Engineering: Visualization (Fall 2022)

Media Coverage

My work has been featured in:

  • Toronto Star: "The Baltimore Orioles are developing a game-changing baseball technology, with help from a Canadian university" (April 18, 2025)
  • Baltimore Sun: "Orioles developing form of AI technology that could someday change scouting forever" (April 23, 2025)
  • UWaterloo Media: "PitcherNet helps researchers throw strikes with AI analysis" (April 23, 2025)
  • CTV News: "Making a pitch to change the game: Waterloo tech to analyze baseball pitcher's performance with smartphone" (April 29, 2025)
  • CBC News: "UW researchers use AI to analyze baseball players' movements" (April 30, 2025)
  • The Globe and Mail: "University of Waterloo, Orioles partner on AI project to track pitcher biomechanics" (May 6, 2025)
  • Global News: "University of Waterloo researchers develop AI technology for Baltimore Orioles" (May 13, 2025)
  • Baseball HQ Radio: "Friday Full Edition w Jerrin Bright" (May 23, 2025)

Designed based on Jon Barron's website. Last updated: August 15, 2026.