Jerrin Bright | Founding Engineer @ Mecka AI

Jerrin Bright

I am a Founding Engineer at Mecka AI, building the data 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 Vision and Image Processing Lab, University of Waterloo, supervised by Dr. John Zelek.

My research focuses on bridging the gap between human and machine perception, exploring how artificial systems can achieve robust world understanding from sparse visual inputs. I draw inspiration from the way humans rapidly infer geometry, motion, and dynamics using limited observations. My broader interests include human motion understanding, vision-language-action modeling, and large-scale multimodal data systems, viewing data itself as an indispensable layer in the development of next-gen intelligent, interactive agents.

Previously, I collaborated with the Baltimore Orioles (MLB) on robust baseball player kinematics analysis and performance evaluation. During my undergrad, I worked with McMaster University, Arizona State University, Yuan-Ze University, and Indian Institute of Science on UAV navigation, visual odometry, camera calibration, and robotics.

Beyond academia, I am an avid cricket and chess enthusiast who enjoys travelling, kick-boxing, skating, sketching, and working out at the gym.

Email / CV / Scholar / X / LinkedIn

News

[Apr 2026] Advanced to PhD candidacy at the University of Waterloo
[Mar 2026] Three papers accepted to CVPR Workshop 2026
[Jan 2026] DreamPose3D submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
[Dec 2025] Attended NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego
[Sep 2025] Joined Mecka AI as Founding Engineer
[Aug 2025] On-site with Baltimore Orioles for PitcherNet deployment
[Jun 2025] Attended CVPR 2025 in Nashville
[May 2025] Gen4D accepted to CVPR Workshop 2025
[May 2025] SportMamba accepted as Oral at CVPR Workshop 2025
[Apr 2025] Featured in Toronto Star, CBC, CTV, Globe and Mail for PitcherNet
[Sep 2024] TokenCliPose accepted to NeurIPS 2024
[May 2024] Best Paper Award at CRV 2024
[Apr 2024] PitcherNet accepted as Oral at CVPR Workshop 2024

Timeline & Experience

Selected work and research experiences spanning embodied AI, 3D vision, robotics, and sports analytics.

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

@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} }

Publications

Representative papers are highlighted. See Google Scholar for a full list.

	Scalable Injury-Risk Screening in Baseball Pitching From Broadcast Video Jerrin Bright, Justin Mende, John Zelek Accepted to CVPR Workshop, 2026 ArXiv \| BibTeX A broadcast-video pipeline for recovering pitching biomechanics and enabling scalable injury-risk screening.
	Interpretable Pre-Release Baseball Pitch Type Anticipation from Broadcast 3D Kinematics Jerrin Bright, Michelle Lu, John Zelek Accepted to CVPR Workshop, 2026 ArXiv \| BibTeX An interpretable framework for anticipating baseball pitch type from broadcast 3D kinematics before ball release.
	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 \| BibTeX Synthesizing domain-specific 4D humans for improving real-world pose estimation.
	DreamPose3D: Hallucinative Diffusion with Prompt Learning for 3D Human Pose Estimation Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2026 ArXiv \| BibTeX A hallucinative diffusion approach with prompt learning for 3D human pose estimation.
	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 Novel measures for analyzing shot quality through net visibility and reachability in hockey.
	Gen4D: Synthesizing Humans and Scenes in the Wild Jerrin Bright, Zhibo Wang, Yuhao Chen, Sirisha Rambhatla, David Clausi, John Zelek CVPR Workshop, 2025 Poster Project Page \| ArXiv \| Poster \| BibTeX A framework for synthesizing realistic 4D humans and scenes in unconstrained environments.
	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 Adaptive multi-object tracking using state space models for team sports applications.
	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 Leveraging language priors to predict keypoints that fall outside the bounding box crop.
	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 A robust framework for baseball pitcher biomechanics analysis from broadcast videos.
	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 A transformer-based approach for 3D human mesh recovery with distribution and depth awareness.
	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 Domain-guided masked autoencoders for unique player identification in sports videos.
	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 Addressing motion blur challenges for robust 3D pose estimation of baseball players during pitch analysis.

Thesis

	4D World Reconstruction of Humans, Scenes, and Camera Systems Jerrin Bright, John Zelek PhD Comprehensive Exam, University of Waterloo, 2026 PDF \| Slides \| BibTeX
	Robust 3D Human Modeling for Baseball Sports Analytics Jerrin Bright, John Zelek Master's Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2024 UWSpace \| PDF \| Slides \| BibTeX
	An End-to-End Autonomous UAV System in GPS-Denied and Unstructured Environments Jerrin Bright, Suryaprakash Rajkumar, Arockia Selvakumar Bachelor's Thesis, VIT Chennai, 2022 PDF \| Slides \| BibTeX

Awards and Honors

Scholarships:

International Doctoral Student Award, University of Waterloo
Engineering Graduate Merit Award, University of Waterloo
University of Waterloo Graduate Scholarship, University of Waterloo
MITACS Accelerate International Award, University of Waterloo
International Master's Award of Excellence, University of Waterloo
Graduate Research Studentship, University of Waterloo
MITACS Globalink Graduate Fellowship, MITACS Canada
MITACS Graduate Research Fellowship, University of Waterloo

Honors and Awards:

Best Paper Award (Computer Vision), Conference on Robots and Vision, 2024
Outstanding Paper Award, RIACT International Conference, 2020
Best Outgoing Student - Robotics Club, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India
Best Club Award - Robotics Club, University Day 2021, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India
Co-Founder and Captain, Atom Robotics - An intelligent robotics and space exploration team @ VIT University, India
Winner in 15+ Robotics Competitions, Held in various Techfests in universities around India

Academic Service

Reviewer: CVPR, NeurIPS, 3DV, IROS, EAAI, CVSports, CVIU, MMSports, TNNLS, TCSVT, 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: Apr. 9, 2026.