Carlos D. Castillo is an associate research professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering whose research interests include face and activity detection and recognition, high reliability AI systems, and accountable deep learning.
Software developed under his participation with IARPA JANUS at the University of Maryland, College Park, has been used by many U.S. government organizations, including the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Justice. In addition, the UMD JANUS system is being used operationally by the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Child Exploitation Investigations Unit to provide investigative leads in identifying and rescuing child abuse victims, as well as catching and prosecuting criminal suspects. The technologies his team developed provided the technical foundations to a spinoff startup company, Mukh Technologies, LLC, which creates software for face detection, alignment, and recognition.
In 2018, he received the Outstanding Innovation of the Year Award from the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization. He was recipient of the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) in 2016.
Before coming to Hopkins, he was assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland from 2014 to 2020 where he was involved with the IARPA JANUS (2014-2020) and IARPA DIVA (2017-2021) teams. He received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2012.